The Bells

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No matter how naïve I find myself, reading student papers always rings bells. They may be alarm bells of my own obsolescence or the tintinnabulation of a new era dawning. Either way, they scare me. Having spent many, many days concentrating on reading papers to the detriment of daily life, I have been submerged into a world that is foreign to me. Yes, I am used to students texting in class, and I know when their laptops are open for “taking notes” that university wi-fi networks are freely available for surfing the net. I know they are only paying half-attention. I may be old, but I’m not completely stupid. Well, not all students do this, but the practice is ubiquitous enough to be considered normative. Their world is a realm of electronic information. The old ways are passing.

I recently learned that footnoting is dead. Already-in-the-tomb-four-days dead. An art that my mediocre high school drilled into every student in English class is no longer even remembered. I even had good students report to me that the campus writing center housed no one who even ever used the Chicago Manual of Style, although some of them had heard of it. In mythology class, any book is referred to as a “novel” or “story” with no regard paid to its actual genre. For those weaned on electronic reading, the old distinctions no longer apply. The Internet is full of information, and many young people can’t discern the wheat from the chaff. Raise your hand if you know what “chaff” is. I didn’t think so.

Seeing all of this in the context of a mythology course is fascinating. Many students refer to the days when gods and monsters actually existed. It is as if the Creationists have won without a struggle. The concept of religion, as reflected in the fiction of mythology, no longer fits the paradigm. Reality is electronic, and paper is fiction. Bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells! At least as I get shelved with dusty books, I will be in a familiar environment with gods, monsters, and dinosaurs. This is the world I was born into and which will not long survive the passing of my generation.

O Hades

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Over the past week I have been grading essay exams for my mythology course. Most of my classes are large enough that assigning written work isn’t really feasible; adjuncts tend to teach many more classes than their full-time colleagues and getting grades in on time is impossible with too much paperwork. I tend to use “objective” tests, although I am aware, pedagogically, they do not reveal what a student actually knows. When I read essays, however, I am always brought to new levels of awareness. I also get the distinct feeling that I’m becoming a curmudgeon, complaining that back in my day you had to write better even to get into college. Regardless, it is a learning experience.

Last night I was reading an essay about Hades. This subject has particular interest for me since I recall attending revival services as a child where the guest evangelist shied away from using the word “Hell” in his sermons. He always called Satan’s realm “Hades,” rather like Paul, but when I studied mythology in school I learned that the places were quite different. Disney’s Hercules once again conflated the person of Hades with a Devil-like anti-god with fiery hair and the most Gothic chariot I’ve ever seen illustrated. This particular essay revealed an interesting religious training for the student; s/he wrote that unlike in Christianity, Hades was not God’s evil brother. The implication struck me – for her/his Christianity, the Devil is God’s diabolical brother. I don’t doubt for a minute that there are churches that teach such theologies, but the more I pondered the essay the more the idea expanded.

The dualism inherent in the view of God versus Satan clearly derives from Zoroastrianism. Judaism never recognized a “devil” character until meeting him in the Persian context of the Exilic and Post-exilic periods. I tarried long among the “orthodox” Episcopalians of Nashotah House where theological correctness was tantamount to being considered an actual human being. In such a school there was no time for those who thought dead Christians became angels or that you got to Heaven by being good. Yet the Devil was very real for these black-garbed acolytes of righteousness. The idea that he could be God’s brother, well, say a dozen Hail Marys and even more Our Fathers and we might let you back in the door. To me, nevertheless, it seems an almost biblical explanation for the origin of evil. Yes, Manichean in aspect, the idea does not fit nicely with a neat monotheism, but what is evil if not the antithetical DNA of God? Non-theology students have nothing to lose by expressing what they were taught in a secular mythology class, and for a brief moment in a student paper I had a glimpse of the true pluralism of Christianity.

Demo C. Rats

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I just finished China Miéville’s novel King Rat. I’ve been thinking a lot about rats lately. This retelling of the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin has a strong Marxist flavor that intrigues the reader into greater possibilities. Each week as I drive the many miles required as a professional adjunct, I think about the bourgeoisie of academia. Many university programs are simply not possible without the many adjuncts willing to be exploited in order to keep them going. While the adjunct is kept below a certain number of courses so that costly benefits do not need to be paid, full-time faculty are kept below a certain number of courses so that they are free to build the university superstructure. Some teach no courses, do no research, and conduct no administration. It is a fair guess whether they even bother to breathe or not. Yet they are paid full salaries and benefits. Academic fossils paid simply to exist.

Saul, the rat-man who would be king, has a conscience. He was raised by his human father to appreciate the sense of what Karl Marx wrote. As the novel progresses, the rats congregate around him, wanting him to be their king. I have been an adjunct instructor for five years now. As I have watched my prospects grow slimmer, my work load has increased for less and less payback. I frequently chat with full-time colleagues who appreciate everything I’m doing. This academic year I am scheduled to teach eleven courses, strictly part-time, of course. Otherwise someone might have to pay benefits. This week one of the schools I teach at actually expanded parking privileges for adjuncts. Not to be nice, but because they had to.

Saul, the would-be king. So biblical. So human. At the end of the story he lives up to his idealism, granting rats autonomy without being sure how it will play out in the real world. There was a time when academics were idealists. Universities are now, like all other aspects of “modern life,” businesses. I’m sure that full-time instructors devote very little thought to those who work for table-scraps to support the system that underwrites their comfortable lifestyles. Certainly a university president or dean would loose nary a wink of sleep over those who’ve given themselves over to the task of Atlas, holding up their sky. It is business as usual. And as the bourgeoisie know, every aspect of life is business. What happens when the rats go free? The end of the story has not yet been written.

Disconnect

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Religion has a bad name among many intellectuals. Hailing from the misty period of superstition in a “demon haunted world,” religion seems to be a quaint hold-over from less enlightened times. Academics, for whom respectability is everything, generally keep a decorous distance from religion as the intellectually suspect field indulged in by the weak-minded. Then something enormous happens; terrorists, fueled by religious fervor, decide to kill many innocent victims. Or a religious guru leads followers into the jungle where they all commit ritual suicide. Or a group of zealots purchase heavy armaments and stockpile them in a Texas hideout to await the Second Coming. The next autumn the university want ads are filled with openings for specialists in this or that religion. Until the next budget crunch comes along.

An unfortunate aspect of this situation is that many deans and administrators make the equation of the study of religion with the promotion of a religion. Why populate a university faculty with superstitious religious sorts when a good secular economist will bring in more practical, if less transcendent, rewards? How often do administrators survey their religious studies faculty to ensure that level-headed, academic treatment of the subject matter is offered? How can we expect to move ahead if those empowered to assure an educated student clientele continually apply the brakes in religious studies departments?

I am no economist. This much is evident by my pay scale. Nevertheless, each year when I return to the multiple campuses that are my temporary homes, I notice the details. New furniture in classrooms and libraries, freshly painted and redecorated facilities. Often, entirely new buildings that were not there the semester before. There was a day when such things were known as window-dressing. I attended Edinburgh University for my doctorate. There were campus buildings that dated from the late middle ages. Classrooms often had mismatched furniture and blackboards rather than fancy projectors and smart-ports. And the educational experience was authentic. The religion faculty was thriving and universally well regarded. I’m no economist, but with fundamentalists already holding a match to the fuse about to light up a Quran, I have a feeling already of what I’ll be seeing in the want ads of next year’s university hiring season.

Can You Handle the Truth?

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Time magazine’s Religion feature this week announces Claremont School of Theology’s decision to go interfaith. In response to declining enrollment, the United Methodist seminary has decided to offer training to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic leaders. Naturally, this will have to be done with the approval and support of training facilities for rabbis and imams, but it will be a way forward for the beleaguered Christian seminary. Seminaries have been in a state of crisis over the past few decades (otherwise it is hard to explain how I might have been hired by one, and a particularly conservative one at that!). And it is not difficult to see why.

Religion is, by nature, conservative. If truth is unchanging, there is no improving upon it. Religions claim to espouse the truth, so stability, orthodoxy – stagnancy – are required. Yet theological seminaries compete with graduate schools for students and faculty. Seminaries crave academic respectability – this is the entire reason for academic accreditation (my old-time colleague Daniel Aleshire of the Association of Theological Schools is quoted in the article). The basic operating premise of institutions of higher education, however, is that we are still learning the truth. We are not there yet. No God reveals the laws of physics in whole cloth (or vellum). Humans must theorize, discover, criticize, and theorize further. Meanwhile, seminaries wave their muted flags and shout, “Over here! We already have the truth!” To be accredited, they have to hire Ph.D.s who have been critically trained. Critical training does not accept simple truth claims. The result: seminaries hire critical faculty while religious authorities insist that the party line be toed. Something has to give.

Offering to bring different religious traditions together is a wonderful idea. Established religions need exposure to each other if the human race is going to survive. Exposure, no doubt, however, will reveal the amorphous nature of truth. The fact is that we are still looking for answers. Everything we have learned about religion points in that direction. What I find particularly telling about this situation is the motivation. Claremont is trying this route for financial reasons. The great god of all higher education, Cash, has finally gotten his talons into religious institutions as well. If there is any unchanging truth out there, it has a dollar sign in front of it.

In gold we trust...

Suddenly the Bible

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Universities are generally reluctant to hire Bible faculty (except in the case of “Christian” colleges where Bible faculty must be a particular brand of “scholar” who has already decided the case before the evidence is presented). The stock reason given to department heads and deans is that religion just doesn’t make money. Universities thrive on the income from science grants and wealthy business and finance donors who want buildings named after them. Religion, it is claimed, doesn’t bring in money. The real problem is that universities don’t know how to market religion.

The other day I visited the local craft store to pick up supplies for a project my wife is working on. While in line I spotted this novelty item:

God in a box?

The shelf was full of them. When I returned later in the week, the supply was severely diminished. Someone had reasoned, correctly, that by putting a cheap length of paper-roll with “biblical” designs printed on it in a kit for making a throw-away mug, it would sell. Obviously universities and colleges couldn’t stoop to such a level, could they? Isn’t it far more respectable to draw your finest students into a mega-stadium to watch guys in tights throw around a fake pig-bladder and emerge drunk enough to vomit up all the costly snack foods they purchased? This is, after all, where the leaders of tomorrow are formed!

While looking up a troublesome word I can’t spell in an online dictionary, I was intrigued by this promotional inset (click to see). All I had done was type in a word on the Merriam-Webster site (it was not a biblical word), and when the answer popped up, so did this self promotional add for “Kiss of Death, Feet of Clay: Words From the Bible.” I don’t pretend to know how online advertising works, but it was clear that Merriam-Webster wanted the cyber-visitor to linger on their site, and the Bible was an effective way to achieve this.

The Bible is all around us. It would be difficult to nominate any other icon that would better illustrate American social self-consciousness. So immediately the sophisticated academic shuns it. Those of us who’ve put our lives into trying to understand the Bible phenomenon are deemed useless as money-makers while our counterparts in marketing and sales laugh biblically all the way to the bank.

Robo-god

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Yesterday I again found myself among the robots. After an early-morning school-bus ride to the New Jersey regional competition in Trenton, a mentor to a team known as the Gearheads, I felt a little out of my league. Soon, however, I fell into the spirit of the competition and watched with increasing interest as individuals highly regarded in the world of robotics lamented the lack of science education in the United States. Having just completed the nightmare of two terms with a creationist president, is it any wonder? In any case, the competition, a modified soccer match for robots – with two teams from Brazil, no less! – soon became as emotional as any sporting event. Well, for the human participants, anyway. I’m not qualified to assess robotic emotions. As the event wound down, a respected (human) member of FIRST Robotics, during a recognition ceremony, overcome with emotion, called out “God bless you!” to the adult volunteers.

Many scientists I know are personally religious people. There is no fortified gateway between scientific reasoning and the childhood teaching of religious belief. Nevertheless, an irony became apparent that has been bothering me all night long. I joined Team 102 as a mentor because of my daughter’s interest in robotics and engineering. My role is to help with editing, since I am a “humanities” type. The irony that leaves me sleepless is that Ph.D.s in the sciences are highly coveted and have an assurance for jobs. Ph.D.s in the “humanities,” however, are a sure way to block you from career success. Since I began this blog I have been officially unemployed (I pick up a course or two here and there, but no full-time offers have been presented). The people who have been most empathetic and helpful in this time of difficulty have been the robotics team. People there have tried to hook me up with people who might be able to help, but I am like an alien on the autopsy table among scientists – where do you begin? How do you help an overly qualified “humanities” ex-professor find a job? Meanwhile my co-“humanities” colleagues helplessly wring their hands and do nothing. Worse, they interview me and decide not to make a hire, based on “religious” reasons.

The past several years, as the recipient of calculated cruelty from many religious folks, stumbling along trying to find a means of reasonable support, I have come to trust the robots. The robotics team has demonstrated the most humanitarian attitude to a fellow human who has been suffering for several months. The religious tell me that God will work it out and go their righteous way. Yesterday, being blessed by a “high priest” of the robotics world, I felt that I finally found a place I belonged. Now it might be time to go back to school and find the real pulse of humanity in the sciences.

Kids building robots

Abuse of Power

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In many ways the naiveté of youth still clings to me. I was reared to respect authority and to trust those whom society placed in power over me. As skeptical experience wears away at this ancient veneer, I have become more retrospective of the whole enterprise of the social experiment. Perhaps I shouldn’t have read The Call of the Wild after all.

A few months back I wrote a post supporting a student at Butler University, Jess Zimmerman, who was being sued by the university for perceived slights against the administration on his anonymous blog. That post has forged a connection between Jess and myself, although I’ve never met him. That connection is one of justice and fairness, traits that should, above all, be upheld by institutions of higher learning. In an email last night, Jess updated me on his situation. The lawsuit has been dropped (my thanks to all of you who signed the electronic petition through this blog), but the recriminations continue. The details are available on Jess’ blog, but the short version is that in order to have a fair trial the university had placed him under a $100,000 bond. I am saddened, but not surprised, by this abuse of power.

Over the past several months I have wearily retrod this familiar path. I too have been the victim of institutional power in an episode that haunts me to this day. In slow motion I watch and rewatch men “in authority” dismantling the hopes and aspirations of a neophyte academic who was left wondering, like a dog, why he was being beaten so. There is no action to take. There is no club to wield. The only thing required is to be aware of the situation. Although I shouldn’t have done it, I did read Jack London’s Call of the Wild. And it is my hope that young students unfairly targeted, like Jess, have the resilience of Buck and will remember their pasts when they come to lead their companions in forging a better world.

Everything’s Better at Harvard (Except Religion)

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My wife pointed me to an important article in Newsweek on the plight of religious studies at Harvard. Now, I have to admit to a couple of bunches of sour grapes right up front. I was accepted at Harvard but elected not to go. Only after I had completed my doctorate at Edinburgh University after a lifetime of the study of religion and found that no jobs were available did I realize my mistake. I met colleagues who had jobs while attending academic conferences. All of those well settled in respectable positions had graduated from Harvard. A similar phenomenon exists in Great Britain. Those who actually find satisfactory positions hold doctorates from Oxford. Problem is, neither Harvard nor Oxford corner the market on good education (oh, the heresy!). People, however, are simplistically impressed by lineage.

In any case, this article by Lisa Miller points out the high drama of academic discord at the Shangri-La of American institutions. The famous linguist, Steven Pinker, who personally believes religion to be a severely faulty means of seeking enlightenment, has worked to prevent a required course in religion at the famed secular university on the grounds that faith and reason do not share the same status. Miller goes on to express how small colleges and state universities are picking up on the slack. My limited experience at Rutgers bears out her observations. In this large, rambling, decidedly secular school, my classes in the religion department are always full and I have to turn students away. Yet the university refuses to allow for a full-time hire. Secular America is deep in a state of denial. Because many academics reject religion personally, they simply can’t see how vital it is to understand it. I personally believe no one should be allowed to hold public office without having completed a course in Bible and its political abuse.

Meanwhile, Harvard still holds back. Its reticence will not prevent misinformed people from using their religion as a means of power and destruction. Pretending that since religion is not personally important it is not important at all has deadly consequences. To me it seems obvious that it is not the school you attend that is important, but what you learn while you are there.

Black Job Market

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An article in the paper has launched me into a curmudgeonly mood. The bright-eyed journalist, eyes full of statistics, was writing about how college graduates make one-and-a-half times higher salaries than their high school diploma holding classmates. I laughed then cried when I saw the standard salary of a diploma holder was higher than my salary with a Ph.D. My thoughts migrated to Mark Twain’s quip about “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Something is very wrong with our system.

Granted, those of us with higher degrees (especially in the humanities) do not enter the profession driven by aspirations of wealth. We do hope, however, to be able to afford to pay the rent. Instead the university world, with a casuistry that would do even a Jesuit proud, has found ways of wringing years of cheap labor out of those who are educating the next generation for those good paying jobs. It is a position that Sisyphus himself would despair to face.

When will we, as a society, fess up to what we know is true? Every industry is driven by money. Hospitals encourage surgery even when it is not necessary to bring in the extra income. Churches hit the guilt or eternal damnation buttons and cash flows in. University presidents ride around in limousines while those who are dangled along by their Ph.D.s beg for the bare minimum of fair treatment. No, I have to disagree with our affable journalist. I believe in education – it is the only way out of this money-hungry mess we’ve evolved ourselves into – but I don’t believe in education for good pay. It just doesn’t ring true.

Mortarboards and Greenbacks

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I admit to being an idealist. I grew up far, far from academia. No one in my family had ever been to college before, but when my high school teachers described it, it sounded like a bookish place where knowledge for knowledge’s sake was valued above all more pedestrian concerns. There men and women read and studied and devoted their lives to learning. They lived in shimmering ivory towers and led the way of the future from their scholastic bunkers. And so I worked my way through college. Granted, studying religion may not have been the wisest choice for changing the future, but it seemed the right course at the time. I found a limited acceptance in academia, an idealist who just didn’t know when to give up. It was only after earning a Ph.D. that I stopped to look over the landscape with informed eyes and began to feel a deep dismay.

The best way to encapsulate that dismay became clear in a headline in the New Jersey Star-Ledger earlier this week: “More millionaires among college presidents.” It seems that the extremely rare job of college president is increasing becoming the path to riches. Now to a guy who has never found that mythical teaching position that supports a small family, this felt like a kick in the gut. More than that, it also summarized the dismal view I’d garnered of academia as a whole: it has become a money-driven enterprise.

The tawdry reasons given to justify college presidents earning six figures, some creeping toward seven, per year is that of unadulterated capitalism. Prestige, keeping up with the other corporate executives in academia, showing the strength of the school through the number of greenbacks wasted on the salary of a single individual — I simply don’t buy it. The college president worth his or her paycheck is the one who would take a pay cut for the honor of having the job. Okay, so I’m an idealist, but I believe that higher education, which began as an outgrowth of religious education in such institutions as the University of Paris, has lost its way. I know adjuncts at Rutgers who earn less than $30,000 a year (in New Jersey!) while the president’s salary tops $635,000. And don’t even get me started on the football coaches! I wonder who would win a purely intellectual contest: the University of Paris vs. the Big East Conference?

Education

What Are They So Afraid of?

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I just had an email from a friend whose son is being sued. By the university he attends. The story was covered in Inside Higher Ed, and although I do not know the ins-and-outs of the episode, it reflects poorly on the state of higher education in this country. The student’s stepmother was dismissed from a chair in the Butler University Music Department and he blogged about it, feeling the dismissal was unfair. I am not privy to the details of the dismissal, but I am intimately acquainted with the ensuing scenario. When the student’s identity was learned, his father, my friend, did not have his contract as Dean renewed. The legal suit, claiming defamation, is still pending.

What saddens me perhaps the most, apart from the obvious social justice issues, is the breadth of such retaliation in institutions of higher education. Having once lost a position in higher education “without cause” shortly after making a principled stand against what I understood to be prejudice, I am particularly sensitive to how schools that have money to hire high-powered lawyers seem to have no difficulty in turning on anyone who criticizes or disagrees with official policy. Isn’t that what higher education is all about? I don’t agree with my colleagues on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean I want them fired! We hand out and we take in.

If it were simply coincidence that I found a single colleague who also faced punitive action from a school for a perceived slight, I might be persuaded that it was an accident of tragedies — two unlikely victims sharing a prison cell. But no, the evidence has been building for some time. During my last years at Nashotah House I taught as an adjunct instructor at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. A faculty search had stalled in the Philosophy and Religion Department and I was local and willing. I was present to watch as two colleagues (the remainder of the small department) were dismissed (denied tenure and forced out) after having been critical of some administrative decisions. They were among four faculty so targeted, and I watched them go with worry increasing in my gut. “Gag orders all around!” No one was permitted to discuss what was really happening.

It was the next year that I was terminated. After moving to New Jersey, I attended a professional conference (SBL, for those of you in the loop) in San Diego. It was probably not unlikely that the person next to me on the plane was also headed to the same conference since it was a 6 a.m. economy flight. Sure enough, I saw the woman reading some theological tome and knew we were headed for the same place. As I struck up a conversation with her, I learned that she had also been dismissed from a college in the south for advocating equal racial representation on the student council. This was not in the 1960s, but a couple decades closer to our own time. No reason was given, but her contract was not renewed.

By this point in time a clear image is coming into focus in my mind. It is not a pretty picture. The scene shows a juggernaut called Higher Education, bloated, powerful, wearing a mortar board, with a killer football team yapping at its heels like wolfhounds, but terribly afraid of criticism. Those who lie crushed under its great feet, the general issue instructors, have earned their place in academia by taking the hard knocks and criticism that are anticipated and constantly delivered in higher education, but the juggernaut drowns out any criticism of itself with allegations of being molested by the critical thinkers it hired to give it respectability and who now lie supine in submission beneath it. Something has gone horribly awry. And instead of talking it over, human-to-human, lawyers are hired to frighten off the weak and silence discussion. “Anything you say can and will be used against you,” thank you Sergeant Friday!

Like a co-dependent spouse, I will always love higher education. It has cradled our most influential minds and taken us beyond our earth-bound dreams. The academy has brought us to the place where we stand today. But universities now also parrot the corporate model and intimidate those who do not take their inspiration from free-market economy. If you feel inclined to voice a vote for the rights of students, this link will take you to a petition for the dropping of legal charges against my colleague’s son. (You will be taken to a donation page after signing the petition, but donations are purely voluntary.) I understand it to be a vote for common sense and personal freedom of expression.