Continuing on from my QOTD from last week, here is another quote from the same chapter from Leonard Cassuto ("Professionalization"), but focusing on student debt--which given the current public discourse should be very relevant:
====
Jeffrey J. Williams of Carnegie Mellon University persuasively compares student indebtedness to indentured servitude. For a new Ph.D. who is lucky enough to land an intellectually rewarding job in his or her field (whether in or out of academia), the burden of paying off student loans on a relatively modest salary means a life of poverty from which the gentility wears off like a cheap coat of paint. Economist Paul Krugman warned in 2005 that the United States is threatening to become a "debt peonage" society, in which borrowers work endlessly for creditors to service debts they can never retire.
We can't talk honestly about professionalization--or the larger meaning of being professional--without bringing debt into the conversation. Debt affects what kind of professional a student is or can be. Graduate students don't explore many of the assumptions that underlie their own professionalization, but they are unsurprisingly well aware of the onus of their loan debts. In this case, it's the professors who lack self-awareness. When professors and administrators countenance practices that maintain (or even increase) time to degree, we make ourselves complicit with a system that hurts our students' lives.
…
But we can also view the time-to-degree question--and with it the idea of professionalism--through the prism of graduate student debt. When I complained in a newspaper column about how academic job searches tend to privilege candidates who stay in graduate school longer, some commenters disparaged my concern. "Who wouldn't hire a [more experienced candidate]?" asked one, while another declared, "Potential is just that" and called it a "risk" to hire a less experienced Ph.D.
But if more time in school equals more debt, then a preference for more experienced Ph.D.'s essentially adds to graduate student indebtedness. If we ask for graduate students to acquire a hyper professionalism in order to get a professor's job, we're essentially asking them to buy that training out of their future earnings--which, given the shakiness of the job market, are uncertain at best. Put simply, we're asking them to spend money that they haven't got and that they can't be sure they will ever get, to acquire a specialized skill set (how to succeed in academia) that they may or may not be able to put to direct use. And we ask those who want to try for a professor's job to do this at the expense of shaping their preparation for other kinds of work.
Viewed thus, a preference for more experienced job candidates is not simply instrumental. It's also pernicious, and redolent of malign neglect of one of our most pressing, but least visible, concerns as teachers of graduate students. We can debate the intellectual pros and cons of graduate student professionalization (hyper specialization, the utility of graduate student publication, etc.) until the next millennium; but let's not forget that money is at stake, and it belongs to the poorest members of academic society.
====
From the outside looking in, there is something very disturbing about this: by creating an entire class of professors who can never retire due to debt, we are only exacerbating the situation that is the dismal job market. Because modern medicine has extended the quality of life for all (which is a good thing), people can literally work for longer number of years. And this all the more so for jobs that are less physically intensive such as the professorship. All things being equal, even without the debt, I can imagine many professors wanting to work for many decades, well past the usual age of retirement that is common (or required) in other jobs. Therefore, professors can work a longer number of years (because health and desire) but they will and must (because of debt). That means even less jobs for those finishing graduate school, which means bigger debt for such graduates, which leads them to lengthen their years of work if they make it to the other side, and on and on goes this downward spiral.
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Thursday, June 20, 2019
QOTD: Leonard Cassuto
Another recommended reading for anyone interested in higher education is Leonard Cassuto's The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015). I've had the pleasure of meeting Lenny on several occasions as he served as a consultant/guest for events we hosted at Emory University. He has provided sage advice and has been gracious enough to listen to my own story in academia (mind you, our fields of expertise are completely different and I have never met him before these events). Anyone who has talked to Lenny about higher education will know immediately how much he cares about "the university" as an institution while simultaneously caring deeply about the graduate students' success and the need to reform the way doctoral programs are set up currently. To provide just a quick background: Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University and is a frequent contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education (see here). I highly highly recommend this book. It is thoroughly researched and includes ~50 pages of endnotes for all of you who want to pursue these questions further.
In the sixth chapter of his book, "Professionalization," I came across the following (likely resonating with many friends and colleagues out there):
=====
Hiring committees now routinely choose among applicants who have accomplished much more than their interviewers had at comparable stages of our own careers. At the same time, though, we've been calling for reducing the time that graduate students take to complete their degrees. How can we square that imperative with our hiring practices?
Just about everyone agrees that graduate students--and academic culture as a whole--would benefit if our Ph.D. students could graduate in fewer years than they do now. Deans call loudly and frequently for streamlined degree programs, and many, if not most, graduate directors have been asked to figure out ways to reduce the amount of time students spend in graduate school …
One important reason that graduate students take longer and longer to finish is because departments don't reward quick finishers with academic jobs. In fact, we do quite the opposite. In the search for the best candidate to fill an opening, hiring committees privilege the kinds of achievements that can be attained only when graduate students stay in school for more time, not less. We offer the highest prizes--full-time faculty positions--to the ones who stay longer.
Let's compare two hypothetical new Ph.D.'s. The specs can be adjusted by field, but the gist of the difference should be clear. Candidate A completed her Ph.D. at a rapid clip and has emerged from her program with a passel of recommendations attesting to the publishable quality of her dissertation and to her creativity, perspicacity, teaching ability, and enormous upside potential. Candidate B, who took three years longer, is also coming out bedecked with praise. She's done more varied and advanced teaching than Candidate A, and she has placed a couple of articles in leading journals in her field.
We would naturally expect Candidate B to have more to show for the extra years she spent in school, and we see as much in the form of her publications, enhanced teaching credentials, and (depending on what field you imagine her in) perhaps work on grants or even some administrative experience. That extra expectation is amply reasonable: if you take more time, you should do something useful with it.
What happens when hiring committees compare the two applicants? This is not a hypothetical question. Hiring committees find themselves presented with versions of this A-B comparison all the time. And if you look at the profiles of the assistant professors who get hired these days, you'll see that the nod almost always goes to those who look more like Candidate B
…
In fact, many departments take it even further and hire assistant professors who have been out for two or three years or even longer. These midlevel assistant professors (who typically show up with an armful of publications and other achievements) for entry-level jobs are then encouraged to reset their tenure clocks backward. Although that adjustment is made post graduation, it essentially converts an experienced faculty member back into a recently minted Ph.D. and thus contributed to the same overall trend (You'd think that departments would instead bring such well-qualified new hires up for tenure early, but somehow that never happens.) To be sure, junior faculty members are themselves complicit in such retrograde moves. Most of those who sacrifice years of experience do so in order to rise up the academic food chain, move o a preferred geographical area, or both. But we can hardly blame them for choosing options that employers make available to them.
What does it mean for an institution to advertise an entry-level position and then pit new Ph.D.'s against applicants who have years more experience? To begin with, it amounts to a preference for concrete achievement over raw potential. It also creates inexorable selective pressure in that direction. After a couple of years on the market, Candidate A gradually metamorphoses into Candidate B.
Choosing experience over possibility can result from the lure of achievement--and the achievements of today's graduate students are indeed considerable. But it can also result from complacency: instead of relying on one's own judgment, one substitutes the judgment of journals and presses. An emphasis on attainment over potential further implies that an applicant needs to have experience in order to get experience: a classic Catch-22 that is bridged by the willingness of departments to employ their student apprentices far past the point of simply training them.
=====
A friend and I have a phrase for that Candidate B. We call them "fake assistant professors." This refers to the fact that such candidates are usually 3-5 years removed, with at least 2-3 years of employment elsewhere. To our minds, they are "fake" insofar as when they are compared with newly minted Ph.D.'s. They often have 3-5 publications in top journals, at least one monograph published (sometimes even more!) and are, for all intents and purposes, "associate" level, but the timing of their employment/tenure hasn't brought them to that point. It is somewhat disturbing that such candidates are applying for what is essentially supposed to be "entry-level," pitting themselves against other new graduates (mind you, as Lenny noted above, this is not completely their fault). How likely is it that a committee will consider the "potential" of a new Ph.D. over such overwhelming portfolios?
In the sixth chapter of his book, "Professionalization," I came across the following (likely resonating with many friends and colleagues out there):
=====
Hiring committees now routinely choose among applicants who have accomplished much more than their interviewers had at comparable stages of our own careers. At the same time, though, we've been calling for reducing the time that graduate students take to complete their degrees. How can we square that imperative with our hiring practices?
Just about everyone agrees that graduate students--and academic culture as a whole--would benefit if our Ph.D. students could graduate in fewer years than they do now. Deans call loudly and frequently for streamlined degree programs, and many, if not most, graduate directors have been asked to figure out ways to reduce the amount of time students spend in graduate school …
One important reason that graduate students take longer and longer to finish is because departments don't reward quick finishers with academic jobs. In fact, we do quite the opposite. In the search for the best candidate to fill an opening, hiring committees privilege the kinds of achievements that can be attained only when graduate students stay in school for more time, not less. We offer the highest prizes--full-time faculty positions--to the ones who stay longer.
Let's compare two hypothetical new Ph.D.'s. The specs can be adjusted by field, but the gist of the difference should be clear. Candidate A completed her Ph.D. at a rapid clip and has emerged from her program with a passel of recommendations attesting to the publishable quality of her dissertation and to her creativity, perspicacity, teaching ability, and enormous upside potential. Candidate B, who took three years longer, is also coming out bedecked with praise. She's done more varied and advanced teaching than Candidate A, and she has placed a couple of articles in leading journals in her field.
We would naturally expect Candidate B to have more to show for the extra years she spent in school, and we see as much in the form of her publications, enhanced teaching credentials, and (depending on what field you imagine her in) perhaps work on grants or even some administrative experience. That extra expectation is amply reasonable: if you take more time, you should do something useful with it.
What happens when hiring committees compare the two applicants? This is not a hypothetical question. Hiring committees find themselves presented with versions of this A-B comparison all the time. And if you look at the profiles of the assistant professors who get hired these days, you'll see that the nod almost always goes to those who look more like Candidate B
…
In fact, many departments take it even further and hire assistant professors who have been out for two or three years or even longer. These midlevel assistant professors (who typically show up with an armful of publications and other achievements) for entry-level jobs are then encouraged to reset their tenure clocks backward. Although that adjustment is made post graduation, it essentially converts an experienced faculty member back into a recently minted Ph.D. and thus contributed to the same overall trend (You'd think that departments would instead bring such well-qualified new hires up for tenure early, but somehow that never happens.) To be sure, junior faculty members are themselves complicit in such retrograde moves. Most of those who sacrifice years of experience do so in order to rise up the academic food chain, move o a preferred geographical area, or both. But we can hardly blame them for choosing options that employers make available to them.
What does it mean for an institution to advertise an entry-level position and then pit new Ph.D.'s against applicants who have years more experience? To begin with, it amounts to a preference for concrete achievement over raw potential. It also creates inexorable selective pressure in that direction. After a couple of years on the market, Candidate A gradually metamorphoses into Candidate B.
Choosing experience over possibility can result from the lure of achievement--and the achievements of today's graduate students are indeed considerable. But it can also result from complacency: instead of relying on one's own judgment, one substitutes the judgment of journals and presses. An emphasis on attainment over potential further implies that an applicant needs to have experience in order to get experience: a classic Catch-22 that is bridged by the willingness of departments to employ their student apprentices far past the point of simply training them.
=====
A friend and I have a phrase for that Candidate B. We call them "fake assistant professors." This refers to the fact that such candidates are usually 3-5 years removed, with at least 2-3 years of employment elsewhere. To our minds, they are "fake" insofar as when they are compared with newly minted Ph.D.'s. They often have 3-5 publications in top journals, at least one monograph published (sometimes even more!) and are, for all intents and purposes, "associate" level, but the timing of their employment/tenure hasn't brought them to that point. It is somewhat disturbing that such candidates are applying for what is essentially supposed to be "entry-level," pitting themselves against other new graduates (mind you, as Lenny noted above, this is not completely their fault). How likely is it that a committee will consider the "potential" of a new Ph.D. over such overwhelming portfolios?
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
QOTD: M. M. Mitchell
I've been reading Margaret Mitchell's Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and wanted to quote something from the near end of her book. I've really enjoyed reading this book, especially powerful and engaging despite just past ~100 pages. Something should be said about the many modern monographs that easily eclipse 300 pages... Anyway, in her final chapter, she has a section titled "Backwards and Forwards: Final Movements" where she writes the following (emphases original):
The adversarial nature of the agonistic paradigm also continues to pervade the discipline of academic biblical scholarship, in which the text, in whole and part, serves as a witness of a thesis on offer, and the readings of others are demonstrated to be deficient when the evidence is cross-examined. And yet the legal paradigm (long before de Saussure or Derrida!) was overt about the fact that texts do not just "mean things" but their meanings rely upon effort, of argument and evidence, to be adjudicated in some public court of appeal. Origen's telling phrase, "For without witnesses our interpretations and exegeses are incredible," is still as true in modern academic biblical scholarship as in his day (that is what footnotes, for one thing, are all about).
On one hand this is absolutely right; all ideas need testing in the court of human opinion, and scholars and students carry out their civic duty as public readers by submitting their interpretations to judgment. On the other, the dualistic framework can lead to the kinds of overstatements about different readings that the rhetorical handbooks recommend the young orator learn in order to press resolutely his own belief … I would like to suggest that what we learn from the ancient agonistic paradigm is that it is a commonplace to present the options as mutually exclusive, as either/or -- one reads a text either literally or figuratively, with no gray area in the middle (after all, juries are pressed by both sides to tender a verdict in their favour). But that binary, rhetorically constructed in favor of one's own reading and against that of another, is hardly an accurate analytical tool for appraising most reading, which is somewhere between the letter of the text and its intent or deeper sense as discovered later, as discerned by some but not others. Indeed, the "literal" sense itself is a construct, a rhetorical claim for textual, for biblical fidelity. But despite the commonplace, no texts stand "without interpretation," for even an appeal "to the letter" is an argument that depends upon focusing the eye of the reader on one or another chosen detail of the many letters which make up a text (no one reads each letter with the same level of emphasis or attention, akribeia, all at once).
The adversarial nature of the agonistic paradigm also continues to pervade the discipline of academic biblical scholarship, in which the text, in whole and part, serves as a witness of a thesis on offer, and the readings of others are demonstrated to be deficient when the evidence is cross-examined. And yet the legal paradigm (long before de Saussure or Derrida!) was overt about the fact that texts do not just "mean things" but their meanings rely upon effort, of argument and evidence, to be adjudicated in some public court of appeal. Origen's telling phrase, "For without witnesses our interpretations and exegeses are incredible," is still as true in modern academic biblical scholarship as in his day (that is what footnotes, for one thing, are all about).
On one hand this is absolutely right; all ideas need testing in the court of human opinion, and scholars and students carry out their civic duty as public readers by submitting their interpretations to judgment. On the other, the dualistic framework can lead to the kinds of overstatements about different readings that the rhetorical handbooks recommend the young orator learn in order to press resolutely his own belief … I would like to suggest that what we learn from the ancient agonistic paradigm is that it is a commonplace to present the options as mutually exclusive, as either/or -- one reads a text either literally or figuratively, with no gray area in the middle (after all, juries are pressed by both sides to tender a verdict in their favour). But that binary, rhetorically constructed in favor of one's own reading and against that of another, is hardly an accurate analytical tool for appraising most reading, which is somewhere between the letter of the text and its intent or deeper sense as discovered later, as discerned by some but not others. Indeed, the "literal" sense itself is a construct, a rhetorical claim for textual, for biblical fidelity. But despite the commonplace, no texts stand "without interpretation," for even an appeal "to the letter" is an argument that depends upon focusing the eye of the reader on one or another chosen detail of the many letters which make up a text (no one reads each letter with the same level of emphasis or attention, akribeia, all at once).
Monday, April 8, 2019
"Privileged"
The NBA presents an interesting context within which to talk about society. It is represented, by all accounts, overwhelmingly by players of color. You could watch any NBA game on any given night and this would be clear as day. Today, in The Players' Tribune, Kyle Korver, a shooting guard for the Utah Jazz published an online article titled, "Privileged." Despite the fact that most NBA players are players of color, there have been numerous incidents this year and in years past of incidents of racism toward players from fans. The most recent one might be when Russell Westbrook's team (OKC) visited the Utah Jazz where a fan said some really nasty words to Westbrook. This is all the more shocking since even the Jazz has many of players of color. In "Privileged," Korver talks about this incident, as well as another earlier one involving his teammate Thabo Sefolosha. The latter incident was especially shocking, since it was clear that Thabo being a person of color led to the altercation leading to his arrest/injury and eventual settlement with NYPD.
Korver acknowledges his own blindness to the situation at hand and wonders how he can become an agent for change/solution rather than sitting idly by on the sidelines. He charges those in positions of "privilege" (i.e. in his case, white players and/or owners) to stand up for what is right and fight for true equity among everyone involved. The article has been received very positively by his colleagues as well as other professional athletes, coaches, and analysts.
When I read this article, I couldn't help but wonder about this idea of being "privileged" even within my own sphere of influence, namely, higher education/academia. This past year and a half, I have had many discussions with friends and colleagues, and it seems to me that academia remains largely a system that benefits those with a particular profile. Various institutions talk about pursuing "diversity" within their personnel, but too often this is just lip service and actual practices do not bear this out. Numerous theological institutions are struggling to deal with this issue. It seems rather crass to see that many schools will happily accept revenue from a particular demographic while failing to cede positions of influence within their own leadership to represent that demographic. I would liken it to throwing a few crumbs by the wayside while reserving the best for the privileged. We have seen with the recent college scandal that higher education is in dire need of serious overhaul since as it currently stands it is often those "privileged" who get into the best schools. If this is true about getting into the best schools, then this is true even thereafter: the (academic) job market. Those "privileged" start far ahead of the game from everybody else, and it leaves everyone else scrambling to catch up (if that's even possible).
If universities and theological schools want to tout themselves as bastions of knowledge, freedom of thinking, and progress, then they must consider how they have been complicit in practices that have favored the "privileged." If sports professionals can do it, then why not academics?
Korver acknowledges his own blindness to the situation at hand and wonders how he can become an agent for change/solution rather than sitting idly by on the sidelines. He charges those in positions of "privilege" (i.e. in his case, white players and/or owners) to stand up for what is right and fight for true equity among everyone involved. The article has been received very positively by his colleagues as well as other professional athletes, coaches, and analysts.
When I read this article, I couldn't help but wonder about this idea of being "privileged" even within my own sphere of influence, namely, higher education/academia. This past year and a half, I have had many discussions with friends and colleagues, and it seems to me that academia remains largely a system that benefits those with a particular profile. Various institutions talk about pursuing "diversity" within their personnel, but too often this is just lip service and actual practices do not bear this out. Numerous theological institutions are struggling to deal with this issue. It seems rather crass to see that many schools will happily accept revenue from a particular demographic while failing to cede positions of influence within their own leadership to represent that demographic. I would liken it to throwing a few crumbs by the wayside while reserving the best for the privileged. We have seen with the recent college scandal that higher education is in dire need of serious overhaul since as it currently stands it is often those "privileged" who get into the best schools. If this is true about getting into the best schools, then this is true even thereafter: the (academic) job market. Those "privileged" start far ahead of the game from everybody else, and it leaves everyone else scrambling to catch up (if that's even possible).
If universities and theological schools want to tout themselves as bastions of knowledge, freedom of thinking, and progress, then they must consider how they have been complicit in practices that have favored the "privileged." If sports professionals can do it, then why not academics?
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Video: Claiming Your Expertise
I came across this video from Emory University's Center for Faculty Development and Excellence. It is a clip from Carol Newsom who is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. I did not have the chance to take a seminar with her (my one regret!) but I did have the chance to work for her for a different project temporarily and all the interactions I had with her were very positive. From everything I've seen and heard she is not only a great scholar (and teacher!, this is an important distinction, one does not follow the other, but my friends in HB have told me what a great teacher she is) but also an awesome and thoughtful person. She came to Candler almost 40 years ago and you can imagine she must have endured a whole lot to get to this point in her career.
I think her short talk is worth listening to and hope it will give everyone resolve to be positive agents of change for the academy as well as strength for their own pursuit of excellence and development as scholars/citizens of this world.
I think her short talk is worth listening to and hope it will give everyone resolve to be positive agents of change for the academy as well as strength for their own pursuit of excellence and development as scholars/citizens of this world.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Public Scholarship
Currently, I've been thinking a lot about "public scholarship." I am involved in kicking off a brand new Mellon Teaching Fellowship that has, as a major criterion of approval, a component of "public scholarship" to be built into the proposed course.
The best definition of public scholarship that I could find comes from Imagining America, a national advocacy and professional institution for publicly engaged scholars:
“Public Scholarship refers to diverse modes of creating and circulating knowledge for and with the public and communities. It often involves mutually-beneficial partnerships between higher education and organizations in the public and private sectors. Its goals include enriching research, creative activity, and public knowledge; enhancing curriculum, teaching and learning; preparing educated and engaged citizens; strengthening democratic values and civic responsibility; addressing and helping to solve critical social problems; and contributing to the public good.”
I have a few friends who care deeply about engaging in great scholarship and also answering the "so what" question, i.e., the relevance of research and scholarship not only for the sake of knowledge or the academy (though those things, in and of themselves, can be valuable), but for the local or global community(s).
A few days ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an online piece titled, "'The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril,'" a quote taken from the interviewee of this article. The subject is Jill Lepore, who is currently listed as the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. All that to say, while her field is far afield from my own, she knows what she is talking about on the "scholarship" ("academic") front. On the "public" side of things, she appears to be a regular contributor to The New Yorker. What I appreciated from this interview, however, is not what she said about her academic works, as important as they may be within her guild, but what she said about the state of "the academy" writ large. She has been at Harvard for 15 years, so it's safe to say, she has witnessed the changing landscapes of higher education.
She observes an "epistemological shift" vis-a-vis knowledge, a transformation from facts to numbers to data.
=====
JL: That transformation … traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact, as well as other factors. When people try to re-establish the prestige of the humanities with the digital humanities and large data sets, that is no longer the humanities. What humanists do comes from a different epistemological scale of a unit of knowledge."
Q: How is the academy implicated in or imperiled by this moment of epistemological crisis?
JL: The academy is largely itself responsible for its own peril. The retreat of humanists from public life has had enormous consequences for the prestige of humanistic ways of knowing and understanding the world.
…
Q: You did your graduate work at Yale in the early ’90s in a post-structuralist American-studies department. You read a lot of Derrida and Foucault. You’ve said that you grew uncomfortable with how you were trained versus how you wanted to write.
JL: … Like any Ph.D. program, what you’re being trained to do is employ a jargon that instantiates your authority in the abstruseness of your prose. You display what you know by writing in a way that other people can’t understand. That’s not how I understand writing. Writing is about sharing what you know with storybook clarity, even and especially if you’re writing about something that’s complicated or morally ambiguous. Also, I like to write about people who are characters, who have limbs and fingers and toes and loves and desires and agonies and triumphs and ages and hair colors. But that’s not how historical writing is taught in a Ph.D. program.
=====
The entire interview is worth reading but two things stood out to me here which I excerpted: (1) the retreat of humanists from the public arena; and (2) the deployment of jargon to obfuscate. I find both of these things highly frustrating and wonder about my own complicity in system(s) that perpetuate this.
I study ancient texts and ancient peoples, but if Christianity (ancient or modern) are examples of ways of "being" human in the world, I wonder if there are ways I could write essays/books or teach courses that can address these issues in my own very small way. I have more to say about public scholarship, but this will be it for now.
The best definition of public scholarship that I could find comes from Imagining America, a national advocacy and professional institution for publicly engaged scholars:
“Public Scholarship refers to diverse modes of creating and circulating knowledge for and with the public and communities. It often involves mutually-beneficial partnerships between higher education and organizations in the public and private sectors. Its goals include enriching research, creative activity, and public knowledge; enhancing curriculum, teaching and learning; preparing educated and engaged citizens; strengthening democratic values and civic responsibility; addressing and helping to solve critical social problems; and contributing to the public good.”
I have a few friends who care deeply about engaging in great scholarship and also answering the "so what" question, i.e., the relevance of research and scholarship not only for the sake of knowledge or the academy (though those things, in and of themselves, can be valuable), but for the local or global community(s).
A few days ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an online piece titled, "'The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril,'" a quote taken from the interviewee of this article. The subject is Jill Lepore, who is currently listed as the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. All that to say, while her field is far afield from my own, she knows what she is talking about on the "scholarship" ("academic") front. On the "public" side of things, she appears to be a regular contributor to The New Yorker. What I appreciated from this interview, however, is not what she said about her academic works, as important as they may be within her guild, but what she said about the state of "the academy" writ large. She has been at Harvard for 15 years, so it's safe to say, she has witnessed the changing landscapes of higher education.
She observes an "epistemological shift" vis-a-vis knowledge, a transformation from facts to numbers to data.
=====
JL: That transformation … traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact, as well as other factors. When people try to re-establish the prestige of the humanities with the digital humanities and large data sets, that is no longer the humanities. What humanists do comes from a different epistemological scale of a unit of knowledge."
Q: How is the academy implicated in or imperiled by this moment of epistemological crisis?
JL: The academy is largely itself responsible for its own peril. The retreat of humanists from public life has had enormous consequences for the prestige of humanistic ways of knowing and understanding the world.
…
Q: You did your graduate work at Yale in the early ’90s in a post-structuralist American-studies department. You read a lot of Derrida and Foucault. You’ve said that you grew uncomfortable with how you were trained versus how you wanted to write.
JL: … Like any Ph.D. program, what you’re being trained to do is employ a jargon that instantiates your authority in the abstruseness of your prose. You display what you know by writing in a way that other people can’t understand. That’s not how I understand writing. Writing is about sharing what you know with storybook clarity, even and especially if you’re writing about something that’s complicated or morally ambiguous. Also, I like to write about people who are characters, who have limbs and fingers and toes and loves and desires and agonies and triumphs and ages and hair colors. But that’s not how historical writing is taught in a Ph.D. program.
=====
The entire interview is worth reading but two things stood out to me here which I excerpted: (1) the retreat of humanists from the public arena; and (2) the deployment of jargon to obfuscate. I find both of these things highly frustrating and wonder about my own complicity in system(s) that perpetuate this.
I study ancient texts and ancient peoples, but if Christianity (ancient or modern) are examples of ways of "being" human in the world, I wonder if there are ways I could write essays/books or teach courses that can address these issues in my own very small way. I have more to say about public scholarship, but this will be it for now.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Translation
This past year, in my work as one of the SIRE (Scholarly Inquiry and Research at Emory) Graduate Fellows, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a team of other fellows in a variety of fields including Biology, English, Environmental Health, and Physics. One of the things we had to learn, as part of our professional development. is how to talk about research to an interdisciplinary group of researchers. This is certainly not easy, even less so when you start mixing humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences altogether. Still, I think this is supremely important in the current climate of academia, and there seems to be a real push (and not just in words) for interdisciplinary dialogue and getting out of our mini silos.
During the school year, then, we taught a group of undergraduate researchers on how to create an "elevator pitch," basically a ~3 minute presentation about their research that even the most novice of listener should be able to reasonably comprehend. This is important, as it shows the listener the value of the research being conducted as well as providing a helpful bridge between serious scholarly inquiry and the general public (= translation).
All this to say, I just finished a wonderful book by Professor Susan Eastman, who was one of my first teachers at Duke Div. She was an amazing teacher and a great person overall, who seemed to have that gift in straddling the academician/practitioner divide. Her book titled, Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul's Anthropology, is a great example of how she melds her interests in serious scholarly inquiry as well as in practical outcomes (the so what question) of that research:
This is a serious book. She wrestles closely with even contemporary discussions in neuroscience, personhood, etc., all in the service of her bigger questions in thinking about Pauline anthropology afresh. Her use of other disciplines, however, is not amateurish or faddish, she seriously took the time to digest and understand what contemporary scientists and thinkers are saying about these issues.
Anyway, in her concluding reflections, she wrote some words that really struck me as being a wonderful example of translation (or at the very least provoking translatable questions, as we will see with her probing questions at the end):
"... the complex overlapping of relational systems means that social institutions must live with imperfection rather than demanding closure and a resolution of differences that will inevitably benefit some and harm others. One aspect of Christian witness is thus to name the lack of closure and the continued ruptures and suffering in all humanity, including the body of Christ. To fail to do so betrays the bodily interconnectedness that underlies Paul's thought; when a community claims to have achieved perfect unity, one wonders who has been left out; when an individual claims to have achieved wholeness, one wonders at what expense that 'integration' has happened. Rather than pushing for some kind of personal or social perfection, perhaps speaking truthfully about the lack of wholeness most perfectly manifests Paul's realism about Christian existence this side of the eschaton …
I suggest that a conversation between Paul and current work on the person affords new opportunities for resourcing Paul's thought in pastoral and clinical settings … the participatory logic of his gospel needs interpretation and articulation to address particular contexts of care in churches and other institutions today. Those contexts include situations in which the worth and identity of the person seems to be at risk, such as the understanding and care of those who suffer from dementia and those who care for them; the articulation of personhood and relationship among and with autistic persons; support for people suffering the aftereffects of trauma; and articulating real hope in the face of death. All of these situations often result in social isolation; all of them are unavoidably embodied; all of them require care in interpersonal networks. How might Paul's understanding of the body as a mode of connection and communication be deployed in such care? How might his depiction of sin as a hostile, enslaving agent be deployed diagnostically in some traumatic situations? Does his view of persons as relationally constituted overlap with debates in psychology and psychiatry about the relationship between biomedical care and talk therapy? Does the understanding of personhood as a criteria-free divine gift speak to debates about the human status of limit-cases, such as fetuses, those in comas, extreme dementia, and so forth?"
If you are currently engaged in research, how do you imagine "translating" it for others and what kinds of provocative questions could be raised on the basis of that research?
During the school year, then, we taught a group of undergraduate researchers on how to create an "elevator pitch," basically a ~3 minute presentation about their research that even the most novice of listener should be able to reasonably comprehend. This is important, as it shows the listener the value of the research being conducted as well as providing a helpful bridge between serious scholarly inquiry and the general public (= translation).
All this to say, I just finished a wonderful book by Professor Susan Eastman, who was one of my first teachers at Duke Div. She was an amazing teacher and a great person overall, who seemed to have that gift in straddling the academician/practitioner divide. Her book titled, Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul's Anthropology, is a great example of how she melds her interests in serious scholarly inquiry as well as in practical outcomes (the so what question) of that research:
Anyway, in her concluding reflections, she wrote some words that really struck me as being a wonderful example of translation (or at the very least provoking translatable questions, as we will see with her probing questions at the end):
"... the complex overlapping of relational systems means that social institutions must live with imperfection rather than demanding closure and a resolution of differences that will inevitably benefit some and harm others. One aspect of Christian witness is thus to name the lack of closure and the continued ruptures and suffering in all humanity, including the body of Christ. To fail to do so betrays the bodily interconnectedness that underlies Paul's thought; when a community claims to have achieved perfect unity, one wonders who has been left out; when an individual claims to have achieved wholeness, one wonders at what expense that 'integration' has happened. Rather than pushing for some kind of personal or social perfection, perhaps speaking truthfully about the lack of wholeness most perfectly manifests Paul's realism about Christian existence this side of the eschaton …
I suggest that a conversation between Paul and current work on the person affords new opportunities for resourcing Paul's thought in pastoral and clinical settings … the participatory logic of his gospel needs interpretation and articulation to address particular contexts of care in churches and other institutions today. Those contexts include situations in which the worth and identity of the person seems to be at risk, such as the understanding and care of those who suffer from dementia and those who care for them; the articulation of personhood and relationship among and with autistic persons; support for people suffering the aftereffects of trauma; and articulating real hope in the face of death. All of these situations often result in social isolation; all of them are unavoidably embodied; all of them require care in interpersonal networks. How might Paul's understanding of the body as a mode of connection and communication be deployed in such care? How might his depiction of sin as a hostile, enslaving agent be deployed diagnostically in some traumatic situations? Does his view of persons as relationally constituted overlap with debates in psychology and psychiatry about the relationship between biomedical care and talk therapy? Does the understanding of personhood as a criteria-free divine gift speak to debates about the human status of limit-cases, such as fetuses, those in comas, extreme dementia, and so forth?"
If you are currently engaged in research, how do you imagine "translating" it for others and what kinds of provocative questions could be raised on the basis of that research?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
