Nobody’s Business

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Working in academic publishing some insights are available that academics typically miss. For example, it isn’t unusual for a professor to ask why royalties aren’t higher on ebooks because “they don’t cost the press anything.” Ah, my poor, simple academics! If only life were so kind. Ebooks don’t require any ink, paper, or binding. They require a whole lot more than that. Ebooks require publishers to hire entire new divisions to oversee the complicated, technical, and swiftly-changing business of having ebooks in the format that they can be accessed by various reader platforms. Think of it this way: instead of buying materials, publishers have to enter an entirely new business area to sell what they always sold without it before. Now let’s twist the letter-opener just a bit more. Ebooks have exploded exponentially. Anyone with an Amazon account can be an author. Who buys academic books? University libraries. How to libraries decide what to buy? Well, let’s just say “it’s complicated.”

Now let’s go a bit deeper. Have you noticed that instead of fewer presses there are more and more of them? Stop and think about this. Universities have been churning out more and more doctorates for a system that has had a shrinking number of positions for at least the last three decades. Yes, someone’s entire academic career could have been spent in a vanishing profession and they never noticed. There are no jobs out there, my dear professors. Why do you continue to churn out graduate students? The student knows that s/he will be expected to publish. A lot. Librarians, whose jobs have gotten a whole lot more complicated, face budgets that have been simplified. That is to say, administrators say “Ebooks cost less, so libraries need less money. Besides, there’s Wikipedia.” A doctoral dissertation on a single word in a single verse on a single book in the Bible is not likely to get noticed in such a situation.

The fact is society is hungry for new knowledge. It just doesn’t want to pay for it. That’s the illusion cast by the internet: knowledge should be free. Tenured professors, however, don’t come cheap. Just ask the professional adjunct living out of his car and eating Ramen noodles heated up with the cigarette lighter. We don’t think about her, however, because she’s not writing books. Society wants an alternative to consumer capitalism. It just doesn’t want to pay for it. Presses start up because there is plenty of content out there—all those dissertations you direct—and anybody can make an ebook cheaply. Print-on-demand alone can keep a press in business. The knowledge pours out the facet, goes over the hands and down the drain. Professors, comfortable in their paneled offices, will never complain. You’ve beat the system—congratulations! But I just can’t help you with those ebook royalties. If you’ll excuse me, my noodles are getting cold.

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Leaving Town

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After grousing about having too little time, today begins a trip out of town. Changing time zones, forsaking civilization, resting at a mountain lake. And I’m thinking of all that I’ll accomplish without having to go into the office for an entire week. I made similar plans last year. I’d lined up all the projects that had been piling up and figured that being away for a while would be perfect for getting them done. On the flight across the country, however, my laptop died. Gave up the electronic ghost and died. I grieved, and I was in shock. Thoughts of buying a replacement came to mind, but then, I told myself, I justified buying all my past laptops because of teaching. I carried my PowerPoints with me to class. We’d become a two, then three, computer family. I remembered the sign-up sheets they used to use when you needed an hour on the computer in the library. I’ve practically become a single entity with my hardware, how would I survive without?

Last year, survive I did. Concerned family members kindly offered to let me borrow their laptops so that I could post my daily ravings here. I was surrounded by nature’s majesty—mountains, a pristine (or nearly so) lake, huckleberries, fresh air—and my thoughts turned to the Borg. I’d read about transhumans, and now, I could see, I was becoming one. I don’t want the internet plugged into my brain. In fact, sometimes I don’t even want it sitting on my lap.

All of this is my long-winded way of saying to the ether that my usual posting pattern may be disrupted. It was at the lake, however, that this blog was born. I’m sure that those who first suggested it are a touch disappointed at the way it has grown up. Initially it was supposed to be mostly podcasts. My servers for those casts, however, charged for the service of holding my voice bytes. I used to get paid for sending that same voice out over a classroom full of students only to fall on the wrong side of politics and economy. So it is that I await my flight to remote reaches—remote reaches with Wifi, if the elements allow. If you don’t see my usual musings at my usual time, this will likely be the reason. Although, this time around, with a new top for my lap, I hope I’ll remember to get outdoors every now and again.

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Up, Up and Away

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OurSuperheroesIntellectuals often have difficulty, it seems, taking popular culture seriously.  I remember feeling slightly guilty taking a class on Science Fiction in college and actually getting credit for it.  At the time—I remember the Dark Ages—a course on comic books, or even superheroes, would’ve been laughed out of the academy.  And not in a good way.  Monsters, likewise, were considered the opiate of the small-minded.  I’m not sure what happened to turn all of this around, but I think my generation growing up may have had something to do with it.  Scholars began to pay attention to more than the cheap paper and eye-catching, if impractical, costumes.  There were, unnoticed by standard readers, messages embedded in comics.  Superheroes may have been telling us something about ourselves.  Now tenured professors can write about various caped crusaders without fear of ridicule.  Some of the books are quite good.

Robin S. Rosenberg’s Our Superheroes, Ourselves, is a rare example of a uniformly fascinating edited volume.  Contributions from a variety of psychologists and psychologists explore several of the deeper aspects of  the superhero phenomenon.  Insightful and thought-provoking, this little book gives the lie to the frequent admonition of my youth that reading such things was a waste of time.  Anything but.  Now, I didn’t have the level of commitment to comics that Big Bang Theorists do, but I recall being entranced by much of what I read.  Some comic panels are still vivid in my head, although I haven’t seen the original in more decades than I’d like to admit.  They are, as one of the essays suggests, a form of modern mythology.  Another form of modern mythology is the movie.  Superhero movies are discussed as well as the print versions.  These cheap, easily read books were more, it seems, than meets the eye.  I’ve fallen a little behind in my superhero movies, but perhaps it is time to start trying to catch up with Superman.

What is really striking, to me, is the discussion of super-villains.  As more than one contributor points out, you can’t have a superhero without the nemesis of an arch-criminal.  This quite naturally leads to the discussion of abstracts: good and evil.  Early comics tended to be Manichaean in this regard.  In our world evil may be much more subtle than it appears on the outside. The book appropriately ends with a reflection on morality. More than one ethical system may be found in superhero tales. Super-villains, apart from becoming role models for some political candidates, allow us to explore our own dark sides. In the end, however, we know that Batman must overcome the Joker, no matter how appealing he may be.

Vitruvian Savior

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If memory serves, I was still in seminary when “Piss Christ” was first unveiled. As photographic art, I can’t say when the shutter snapped, but I seem to recall animated discussion over it and since seminary animated discussion has been at a premium, so I think I’d remember something like that. In any case, the artwork still has the power to shock and enrage as the world teeter-totters in its love-hate relationship with religion. Some people seem surprised when other people respond somewhat pointedly to what they perceive as affronts to their beliefs. The thing about beliefs is, well, people believe them. In this day of electro-chemical signals between synapses it may be hard to attribute any substance to belief. Still, if someone makes that claim, insult their mother and see what happens. Beliefs, by their nature, are sacred.

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I was reminded of this when my wife pointed out to me a story about Dartboard Jesus. If you’re not a Rutgers University person (as I no longer am), it takes only a little imagination to visualize this artwork. Conjure a dartboard in your mind. Then picture a crucifix superimposed on it with darts instead of nails. Red darts, if that helps. You’ve got it. The official name of the piece is “Vitruvian Man,” but the public outcry was enough to have the piece removed from public display. I taught (strictly as an adjunct, no complications, please) at Rutgers for four years. People sometimes expressed surprise that multiple sections of Intro to “Old” and New Testaments filled up every semester. I wonder if the university ever takes measure of its students’ beliefs. I had Seventh-Day Adventists in my courses. I had Jains, Muslims, and Hindus. I had Atheists and, God help us, Episcopalians. One thing all these people had in common was belief. Not beliefs, but more singular: belief.

No one in the world intentionally believes falsely. Indeed, should Oxford Dictionaries be trusted, belief is “Something one accepts as true or real.” By definition, it seems, beliefs are believed. Artists serve a valuable function in expressing ideas that words struggle to articulate. There is more going on when your crucifix is juxtaposed to a glass of urine or a dartboard than you might otherwise imagine. It says something about belief. In some cultures such heresy is punishable by death. It isn’t so much a matter, I would suggest, of freedom of expression as it is a matter of advocacy. Artists are teachers and even teachers sometimes don’t consider how their lessons will be taken. Respecting belief, perhaps, is something electro-chemical signals leaping tall synapses in a single bound simply don’t understand.

Used Knowledge

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One of the unadulterated pleasures of life—or maybe adulterated is the better adjective—is the used book sale. The year I missed the Hunterdon County Friends of the Library sale felt like a year without a summer. There are other book sales around, but this one’s my favorite. Books are my heroin. You see, I became an academic because it was too difficult to make a living as a writer. Besides, I never formally studied writing and what are you without credentials? Just a poser making some claim of talent. Like most academics I learned to write in staid, measured prose, never exaggerating or showing any emotion. Research for that kind of writing requires a university library since who can afford those kinds of books and you need a JSTOR account to keep on top of all the journals. You read and read on the same topic for months at a time until you have something new to say. Thus knowledge, they tell us, progresses by baby-steps, into a safe and conservative future.

Nietzsche, meet Evangelicals

Nietzsche, meet Evangelicals

The reading that I do is of a different species. I’ve had academics ask me “why don’t you do research on the bus?” Have you ever tried to do research on a bus? Some stranger sleeping next to you with his/her body relaxing and melting into your side of the seat, their arm falling off their rotund belly onto you before being retracted to start the cycle all over again? And staid, measured prose before the sun comes up hardly makes the trip any faster. Of course editing pays much, much less than the professorate. So I buy cheap books. Nothing like a buck a book to bring out the reasonable side of any economically minded obscure private intellectual. You never know what you’ll find at a book sale. Some of my best reading experiences on public transit have been at the behest of orphaned books others turned out into the streets. Books I would never have read otherwise. Books that I feel would understand me.

The once and future academic in my brain tries to reconcile this with what I paid thousands and thousands of dollars to learn how to do (research). Isn’t this in some way pushing knowledge forward? After all, maybe a dozen people will read this post and that’s kind of like publishing, isn’t it? Don’t mind me, I’m just book drunk. It’s the used books talking. While my academic friends prepare themselves for a summer off, some going to vacation houses they justly deserve, I’ll be filling my commute with adulterated books. And hopefully by the time I reach the bottom of this stack another sale will come along so that I don’t have to go through withdrawal. Methadone for books hasn’t been invented yet, and besides, I take no substitutes.

Ivory Towers

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I sometimes confuse “ivory tower” and “ivy tower.” It’s only a matter of or. In my mind the halls of academe are frequently covered with ivy, but the usual term for a rarified higher education is actually “ivory tower.” A pristine, white edifice unstained by the concerns of day-to-day life. It never occurred to me that the phrase might be biblical. According to tradition, King Solomon quoth, “Thy neck is as a tower of ivory” to his beloved (Song of Songs 7.4a). How the term moved from an obscure reference in a love poem to higher education involves the nature of the latter. Higher education was an enterprise of the church. These days we tend to think of religion as opposed to learning, but in fact, universities were natural outgrowths of cathedral schools where future clergy were trained. There was also a guild-consciousness about the Middle Ages that also played into this, but primarily what we think of as universities today were developed to educate clergy. Many of the Ivy League (again with the ivy!) had their origins as seminaries.

Ivory towers, however, are still remote from this. Eventually, probably due to the difficulty of interpreting the Song of Songs, ivory tower came to be an epithet of the Virgin Mary. Indeed, some interpreted Song as the love between Mary and the church. Rather than the erotic intent of Song, which quickly became an embarrassment to the chaste church, the ivory tower came to symbolize the purity of the Virgin. Untouchable, sparkling white. From the pre-Reformation church, universities sprang. Devotion to Mary ran high.

Although the origin of ivory towers as a metonym for universities is uncertain, it appears in literature by the nineteenth century. Possibly it reflects nothing more than the dignified life of the mind as opposed to the sullying of hands. Or perhaps it reflects a deeply buried knowledge that the university, as secular as it has grown, is a scion of the church with its devotion to a virgin who somehow commandeered the language of a love poem from antiquity. Today ivy is less common on campuses than it used to be. Our higher education is much too modern and chaste for that. The towers of ivory, however, remain. Now they refer almost exclusively to dreamers who’ve lost touch with the everyday world. And, as often as not, with the Bible that gave them their start.

Moral Money

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Yesterday I spent at the Mid-Atlantic Regional American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature meeting. Not a registered guest, I was there in mufti. Those who know me stopped by to greet me, even without a name tag, but I noticed, as I increasingly do, the youth of the attendees. Apart from the business discussed, the issue of these younger colleagues kept arising. It’s as if the tap was left on but the glass is already full. Presidential aspirants aside, we live in a world where people are increasingly realizing that you can’t squander resources. We have compulsory education to try to make the next generation smarter, more fortunate than our own. And those who have the inclination and ability to go on for advanced study, we throw into menial jobs and poverty because, despite the myth, a doctorate doesn’t help your financial prospects. Universities have become businesses and one of their top-end products is the doctorate. The doctorate with no future.

Sitting in the lobby between appointments, I can’t help but thinking back to a younger me. I am part of what older colleagues are calling “the lost generation” of humanities scholars. Those who have the credentials but no opportunities. A wasted resource of a nation that loves reality TV and blustering windbags, as long as the windbags are billionaires. It makes me sad to think that instead of making a place for those driven to high achievement, that we’ll offer them poverty-level adjunct positions with Obamacare, food stamps, and excessive hours. When they burn out, like a high wattage bulb, we’ll go to the closet and screw in another to replace them. Just don’t turn off the tap. Graduate students bring in money.

This is a moral issue. Since it involves what are scare-quoted as “the elite” we seem not to care. Isn’t it fun to knock down those who think they know too much? I sit in the lobby and watch the bearded young men, the young ladies with heavy backpacks thrown over their shoulders, and I want to warn them all. And it’s not just me. My colleagues, lost generation or not, all agree. We’re sending our best students to oblivion. In the most prosperous nation in the world. You can tell we’re prosperous because all it takes to gain the confidence of a political party is lots of money. Lots and lots of money. I won’t mention the obvious that such loose lucre could be put to good ends, making jobs for those who’ve poured their lives into bettering their minds. Or maybe I will. It is a moral issue, after all.

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The Price of Academic Publishing

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During seminary, I believe it was, a professor once told those of us in class, “You don’t get rich in academic publishing.” As the author of a widely used class resource, he added, “unless you write a textbook.” Both sides of his observation are true. I work with many young scholars who haven’t published as much as I have and I have to “manage expectations.” No, that monograph will not become a bestseller. Libraries will buy it, and, statistically, a few hundred people will read it. For those who play the more lucrative game of being acknowledged experts, however, cash can be freely flowing. The public is hungry for authentic information on religion. Despite what we’re told in the media, people are very curious about the truth.

My own academic career ended before I could crank out all the books I’ve got in my head. You have to reach a certain stage of academia before that begins to happen. I’ve been working on my writing in the meantime, and I think I might be able to reach that crossover crowd that writes for non-professionals. I’m not sure I’ll have the time, but the ideas and, I hope, the skills are there. This all came back to me when preparing my taxes. One of the truly religious certainties of this world, taxes are, I know, for the common good. At least in theory. I never complain about them. Preparing them is a different story. My little book, Weathering the Psalms, followed the typical academic course of being largely ignored. I received a small royalty check for it. I wished I hadn’t. You see, I use TurboTax to file my return because someone with as simple an economic life as I have finds hiring a professional superfluous and, ahem, not cost effective. We don’t own a house or any capital. We just hope we’ve paid enough to get a little back in the spring.

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Then I came on the 1099 for my meager book royalties. (They were in the double digits, just to give you an idea.) I tried to enter it into TurboTax. Uh-oh. That kind of income requires a separate form. “Congratulations,” the screen said, “on earning money from your freelance business.” That can’t be good. It turns out I had to purchase an add-on for TurboTax to handle this new tax scenario. The add-on, literally, costs more than the amount of royalties. Technically, then, I lost money on the publication of my latest book. Those are the harsh realities of academic publishing. An abstract publisher contacted me a few days later—would I like to do the abstract of my own book? Why not? I’ve paid for it. If I ever get back into academe I’m going to write books people will want to read. In the meantime, I write them to contribute to the tax base. At least academically.

Universal Universities

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DearCommitteeHaving been in academia for nearly two decades, and having watched from the sidelines ever since being benched, I found Dear Committee Members a little too true to life. This novel by Julie Schumacher is presented as a series of letters of recommendation by an embattled English professor at Payne University. Set over the course of an academic year, the reader watches as the fictional university eviscerates the humanities to make the life of more “practical” departments like Economics much more comfortable. Sarcastic, bitter, and full of pathos, the novel is frequently funny, but it runs so true to life that it would be difficult to say whether it is indeed fiction or not. The book was a national bestseller, but universities continue down this very road, with all seriousness.

I have said before: it is time for those of us who really believe in education to take on, challenge, and overthrow this paradigm. Education is not about making money. There is more to life than that. My reading, which coalesces somewhat coincidentally around these themes (Dear Committee Members was recommended to me by a bookseller that I don’t know personally), paints a larger picture that is disturbing. The capitalist economy is growing out of control, its own dictates now excluding human decision (see my post on At the Altar of Wall Street earlier this week), and one of its strongest investors is higher education. It is a business, you see. The utter and complete devotion to the economy cannot take place without new generations of students indoctrinated into money as the meaning of life. Some of us—many of us—disagree, but we are not organized and we have no funding. We are the human resistance.

Setting out to make money was never my goal in entering the professorate. Motivated by finding authentic meaning in life, I have found that those departments where such a search resides—religion, philosophy, English, music, the arts—are under siege and constantly have to justify their existence to the administration. Dear Committee Members is funny in its overstatement, and in having a protagonist actually say what many of us think. And thinking is what it is all about. Education is about learning to think. Not earning a mint. We are in need of an altar call. The only ones with power to take back education from corporations are people. Who’s willing to join the cause with me? At this point I’d even be willing to consider sympathetic robots.

Yopp

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My fellow academics, lend me your ear. Two or three friends have sent me articles this past week, featuring academics speaking out against the businessification of academia. I’ve been railing about this for years, and I am encouraged by my fellow academics who are looking up from their research long enough to realize they live in a crumbling, if ivory, tower. Too long and too often academics have taken the road of least resistance. Jobs may be rare, but hey, I’ve got one, so who’s to complain? It is tres chic not to believe in anything these days, but I am now, and have always been, a believer in education. And education is not something that can be bought or sold. Higher education is not a business, and if society insists on replacing university presidents with CEOs, then it is time for those of us who believe in education to unite and form our own forums to educate. It won’t pay as well. You might have to skip an academic conference or two, but if we really believe, we can make a difference.

I’m not finger-pointing here. I know that when I had an academic post, such as it was, I wasn’t particularly motivated to suggest that a new model was needed. But now that adjuncts and those of us who are underemployed Ph.D.s outnumber our tenured brethren and sistren, it is time for us to begin talking about alternatives. Once a university becomes a money-making machine there’s no turning back. Too many people love money too much for there to be enough integrity for a president to say, “No, I don’t need a raise. Hire more faculty instead.” Those academics who believe it will happen need to get out more. Although the most educated people in a given society, academics can also be among its most naive. If you can’t join them, beat them. (Metaphorically, of course.)

My education, in many ways, began with Dr. Seuss. We couldn’t afford the books, growing up, but we had television—especially the poor have television. I remember watching, anxious with encouragement, as JoJo sets aside his yo-yo to lend his voice to a cause. His lone “Yopp” saves an entire world. My fellow academics, those with ears like Horton are rare. His species of elephant (let those with ears to hear, hear) may be extinct. I am suggesting right here, right now, that we get together and start working on a solution. This is my Yopp. I shall not, however, be surprised if my inbox fails to light up. The temperature, I know, is already rising. And Whoville, as always, will make itself available for purchase to the highest bidder. I believe it can be different.

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Credit Is Due

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In an article on Nomad by Brandan Robertson, the issue of Larycia Hawkins at Wheaton College is discussed. Hawkins was suspended for stating that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Robertson’s analysis, in my experience, is right on target. He suggests that when he was a student at Moody Bible Institute he was told that the school was a “discipleship institution” rather than an academic one. This leads Robertson to conclude that the school practices indoctrination rather than education. Although I’ve been saying similar things for years, there is a particular point that stands out here. Institutions like Wheaton and Moody, and others I could easily name, receive the benefits of academic accreditation for non-academic programs. These schools do educate; however, the education is not an academic one. Any faith group that has already declared that it has the final answers has no motivation to promote free inquiry. New information is dangerous, and indeed, is often treated as heretical. Accrediting bodies shrug their shoulders and say, “whatever.”

The purpose of academic accreditation is to ensure that a degree is worth the paper it is (computer) printed on. I could establish myself as an institution of higher education but the reason no one would take me seriously is that I’m not accredited as one. At the same time, schools like Bob Jones and Oral Roberts universities are given the seal of approval while teaching that the standards of higher education as recognized by any non-biased board are wrong. Revelation, not research, has already revealed the truth. And these schools grant degrees that have accreditor’s approval. Some of it is doubtlessly political. Other aspects are more difficult to fathom.

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I’ve known accrediting bodies to visit a campus where faculty and students give intentional and obvious warning signs that the school is not offering what it claims because of some point of doctrine. I have yet to see even a notation to come on a record because of this. And they call it education. Open minds, willing to accept what the evidence indicates, are classified together with those closed to new ideas. Just learn by rote what our favorite spokespersons have said and you’ll get your degree. The nation’s accrediting bodies won’t interfere. If I could only get them to visit my house, I’d start handing out degrees as well. Only to those who pay four year’s tuition, of course.

Go to, Let Us Make Brick

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Next year marks a quarter century. It’s a sobering thought. A quarter century of attending the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting. A lot has changed over the years. Much of the loss, I fear, has been of innocence. When I first flew into Kansas City, naive at 29, and still believing the world offered opportunities for those who would work hard enough, the academic job market was tight. I had no interviews whatsoever, and spent many hours in the employees’ hopeless lounge, dreaming that someone might call my name. Although no jobs came of it, I could hardly blame the academy for “market conditions” outside their control. An economy based on unadulterated greed and emulating the worst practices of the business world was eating higher education alive, from within. I had no way of knowing. For a couple of decades I attended more often than not, optimistic that the lies I’d been told might yet turn out to be false. That those who had the gifts and abilities would be recognized for what they were. I was so terribly young then.

Through a variety of roles I have continued to attend this conference for all these years. I have not seen so much hopelessness until this. Colleagues come to me, barely holding back tears. Conditions in our universities are bad and are getting worse. We have no students, but clients. The hours of preparation for the classroom are now being measured in metrics like “return on investment.” The basic vocabulary of higher education has evolved to the point that it is a new Tower of Babel. It sits on Wall Street and considers what is offered to our young as commodities. Nobody worries if they learn anything or not. The exchange of goods at personal advantage is the only way that one can exist in a market economy.

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The only hope any culture may dare to claim for its future lies in education. Those economies that have not suffered as much as our own are those where education is still revered. Where you don’t have to hold a MBA to speak with authority. Where truth might just be an abstract and where not all things can be measured in shekels. I have been attending this conference for a quarter century and never I have I seen despair such as this. I have to wonder about a nation that takes those highest achievers and those with the most initiative and slaughters their hopes on the altar of the angry deity of vain baubles of self-aggrandizement. We bet on futures that are no futures at all. My beard is whiter now, and my glasses stronger. I am still able to see, however, the folly of launching into the North Atlantic in early April before any kind of radar has been invented with lifeboats made only of money. I only hope I’m wrong.

Think Bigger

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PlanetRagesI’ve spent a lot of time with academics. Having been one myself, I know something of their habits. Getting through a doctoral program involves, at least in some fields, becoming the specialist on a very tiny piece of information. Since people have been thinking about things for millennia, finding something new to say can be a challenge. Often, by the time they’re done, newly minted doctors know an incredible amount about a very specialized topic. This is, in many ways, simply an intensification of the human experience. We think small. Part of the problem is that our brains haven’t evolved to think big. Having learned an awful lot about the weather in the book on Psalms, I have instinctively taken an interest in natural disasters. Charles Officer and Jake Page share this interest, as is evident in When the Planet Rages: Natural Disasters, Global Warming, and the Future of the Earth. This, however, is a big idea book. Globally big.

Throughout the first two sections of the book, which deal with humans in the face of nature, God often comes up. As scientist and science writer (respectively) Officer and Page simply reflect common beliefs. Nowhere do they advocate invoking God, but they note that throughout history, in the face of just about any species of natural disaster, people have. Many people still do. Disasters and God. What a team! We worship what we fear. Once Officer and Page reach the third section of human impacts on nature, however, God drops out of the picture and the fingers are pointing solely at us.

When I read about what we’ve already done to this planet, I, as a colleague once said, start seeking another species to join. We have destablized the atmosphere so throughly that it will take at least ten-thousand years to return to it’s pre-Industrial Revolution state. Ten-thousand years. At the same time, the largest industrial pollutor (the United States) has jury-rigged politics so that only the wealthy can attain high office. Votes can be bought and we simply won’t sign the Kyoto Protocol. Those who knowingly doom their children are the smallest thinkers of all. We have changed the course of the biosphere well beyond our share of time, and even those scientist who deny global warming know that it is true. You don’t bite the hand that signs the pay check. After all, specialists have a tendency to be very small thinkers.

Yes, Virginia, There Are Ghosts

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Universities find themselves in a strange position vis-à-vis the supernatural. I suspect that many institutions of higher education are slightly embarrassed at the fact that universities began primarily as training grounds for clergy. We’ve moved away from all that superstition and now believe that only science leads to knowledge. That’s why I find the University of Virginia’s magazine article on ghosts so refreshing. We all know better than to expect a straight answer from academics faced with the awkward question of belief, but the campus magazine invited six department representatives to a discourse on ghosts. The article, which can be accessed online, asked Art History, Anthropology, Religious Studies, Literature, Neurology, and Archaeology faculty about ghosts. At least they were willing to talk about the subject.

Edgar Allan Poe's room at the University of Virginia

Edgar Allan Poe’s room at the University of Virginia

Even in this world where skeptical ridicule is an accepted part of academic practice, we can’t quite let go of the idea of ghosts. They are among the most ancient of beliefs, and even despite the proliferation of apps that let you add specters for any occasion of selfie or digital shot, people still see them often enough to make academics wonder what is going on. Since science only studies that which can be measured, we suppose ghosts lie outside that realm. Those who’ve popularized “scientific” approaches to ghost hunting on television don’t bring their scientific credentials to the discussion. Anyone can be taught to use technology. (Well, not anyone—I sometimes still find my computer at complete odds with me. Technically, however, it is just an inert piece of matter.) From time to time serious scientists have turned their attention to ghosts. Results have been inconclusive.

As the leaves are beginning to fall, and the temperature follows suit, we know that many months of long nights lie ahead. Trees without leaves and air without warmth tempt our minds to believe that perhaps the microscope can’t reveal all that exists in this world. Halloween, after all, has become a major spending holiday and that assures its veracity. Driving through town, it is clear that it is quite an investment for some. Down in Charlottesville they are hunched over their desks, writing lecture notes and grading papers. As the wind blows that empty branch against your window on a overcast evening, however, it won’t matter what department you call home. There will be ghosts about tonight.

Dog in a Manger

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I’m easily amused. I suppose I never outgrew that sophomoric fascination with the little things that seem like big jokes. The other day, for instance, I was given a copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education to read. The supplement featured Great Colleges to Work For; what are we supposed to do with that? None of them have jobs, so why advertise? It’s so funny when those who have a great thing going advertise it, even though there’s nothing to it beyond bragging rights. Those of us who’ve tried repeatedly to get into higher education (and I even succeeded for nearly two decades, in some measure) would love to take a job at even the worst college to work for, but they’re not hiring either. Nobody is. So why does the Chronicle want to remind us that the fruit will always be just out of reach, and that the water will be just too low to sip—even if we’re bathing in it?

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The frustration that settles in when the laughter dies off is because everyone I know agrees that I should be teaching. Colleagues, tenured and not, former students, friends. “Why aren’t you a professor?” they say. Many of my best friends are. Full professors. Sabbaticals. Grants. Time that’s not spent on the bus or in the office. Perks of every sort. Ask them. Or ask the Chronicle. I can’t reach the grapes, but they’re probably sour anyway. I mean, I can’t help it that I spend hours on faculty webpages and see those who made the cut not writing the books I have like jets in a holding pattern over Newark. How can the get written when time is he one thing I haven’t got? (Oh, and money too, but you don’t need so much of that to write.) Any one of those Great Colleges to Work For appear on the advertisement pages? Anyone hiring a warmed over religion professor who reads a hundred books a year? Nah!

Just joshin’ ya. I poke fun at higher education like you can only tease a lover. I’m into exercises of nihilism as much as the next prof. Didn’t old Ecclesiastes say it centuries ago: learning is a zero-sum game? So the academic vehicle that doesn’t boost the number of jobs offered will continue to tell us where we should work, if there were any jobs. Perhaps professors of privilege demand more than I think. Just give me a classroom and a syllabus to teach her by. I’ve done so in very primitive conditions at a college that make no marks on the “Best of” scale. Real world experience, however, doesn’t count. We’re only telling you what you can’t have anyway. Isn’t that better than where you work now?