Child's play

Happen to have seen the Brooklyn Museum's version of Edward Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom" (c. 1834) in their Visible Storage yesterday (we'd gone for the unconvincing "Monet and Venice" blockbuster), just in time for the Old Testament reading for Advent 2. As ever, I'm caught short that it nowhere says "the lion shall lie down with the lamb," but this time I was reeling at all the predatory pairings it does mention. 

The wolf shall live with the lamb;
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed^[b] together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze;
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
⁹ They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9, NRSV)

This year, since we are in a time of predators' revachanchism (cf. esp: Hegseth, Pete), it came to me that none of these pairings is arbitrary. Each must recall a time when a leopard actually killed a kid, a bear mauled a cow, a lion attacked an ox, children were killed by snakes. (It was like the moment you realize that the curious details in monastic and legal codes like the Vinaya and Benedict's Rule are reports of actual episodes.) The sheer volume of cases overwhelms, as does the almost deluvian mixed metaphor of a mountain covered by the sea.

We had a guest preacher in church today, who focused on this reading to complement the gospel account of John the Baptist's call to repent - for the kingdom of God is near. Repentance means turning away, she explained, but you can't change course unless you can imagine an alternative. It seems more urgent than ever to imagine a world without normalized, even celebrated violence. Delightfully, she had learned to feel the nearness of the kingdom through reading Ed Yong's wonderful An Immense World.

Cold Moon

Last supermoon of the year, espied early this morning.

Code red

A little update from The New School, where things are not looking good at all. Yesterday all the full-time faculty in the programs slated for pause, merger, reimagining and various kinds of "discontinuation" received letters offering "voluntary separation" packages, as did all non-unionized staff across the university who have served at least four years. At the same time, all full-time faculty over 62 were offered a "voluntary early retirement" package. That's a lot of people spooked and demoralized by the suggestion they are disposable.

A little to my surprise, I didn't receive one of those letters. Being not in a department turned out to be a plus, at least for now. But almost all my friends did get a letter. The hope of course is that enough people are willing and able to take up the "voluntary" offers that there will be no need to turn to "involuntary separations," but we don't know how many people the administration wants to get off the payroll. Meanwhile rumors are swirling about significant and targeted cuts, especially in the erstwhile Graduate Faculty. Nobody seems to know who's calling the shots - deans claim to have been blindsided - so everyone feels at risk.

Acknowledging that the administration's hand has been forced by a budget crisis, this is surely the worst backdrop for ushering in what leadership was touting as the "next generation of undergraduate and graduate credentials." It's terrible for morale, and for the reputation of the school. And, as we all speculate about what programs The New School will support in the future (and the existential question whether there will be place for each of us), it undermines already strained solidarity across and within divisions. Not good times at all.

Has your back

The baboon is one of the forms (with the ibis) of Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of writing, wisdom, magic and the moon, but this imposing baboon seems just to be a baboon, doing what ancient Egyptian baboons were known to do: praising the rising sun.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice

Elect

In the midst of all the other stuff... I'm going to be one of the three co-chairs of The New School's University Faculty Senate next semester.

Wintry mix

Predictably, the Thanksgiving break was long enough for the courtyard maples to shed all their leaves. The ground will still glow red for a spell, but other color will have to wait until the red buds at the end of leafless branches let loose in the spring... Or so I thought, only to be surprised by cardinal (not in the photo)! 

Stalactite city

Always stunning, Elmhgreen and Dragset's "The Hive" at Moynihan.

New chapter

I want to mark a tense, surreal moment. 

This is the time in the academic year when past and future are all bunched up with the present. We plan courses for the academic year beginning next fall, our allocated numbers based in part on experience of last year. Meanwhile registration for the courses beginning in January has taken place, and some courses with low enrollments have to be cut. If a cancelled course was to be taught by a full-time or annualized part-time faculty member, they might be assigned to a course originally planned for someone more junior, though this rarely happens. 

This year everything is different. The budget crunch caused by enrollment shortfalls means the threshold for course cancellation is higher (and a final cull of courses not at 75% has yet to take place), and course allocations for academic year 26-27 have been trimmed, too. But that’s only the tip of the restructuring iceberg. Planning for 26-27 is reeling from the pausing and merging of "duplicative" or low-enrollment programs. Last week we learned that the small undergraduate majors in history, anthropology and sociology have been shut down, their faculty enjoined to work out something more streamlined and attractive to students. Their work, we are told, will serve as a "model" for the rest of the "humanities and social sciences unit." Whatever 26-27 portends, 27-28 will be different again.

And that's not the last of it either. In the coming days, notification of liquidity cliff-forced "reduction in forces" for full-time faculty will begin, with letters offering "voluntary early retirement" and "voluntary separation." We don't know to how many people these will be sent; nor do we know how many of those offers would have to be taken up to forestall the "involuntary separations" which would otherwise ensue - or what determines who will be affected by each of these measures. Against the backdrop of the unmooring of many departments in the "humanities and social sciences unit," this left many of us heading into the Thanksgiving break not knowing if we were soon to be let go.

I'm not dwelling here on my own case, though I would be surprised not to be getting one or other of the kinds of letters promised for this week. I was already senior enough to be "eligible" for "special voluntary separation" when the university was in the throes of COVID five years ago, and my appointment has never been in a department. I expect wrenching choices in the coming week: leave or stay on a possibly sinking ship which might cast me overboard for ballast anyway? I'm far from the only person contemplating these grim questions, though those of us also responsible for curricular planning are experiencing this uncertainty at two levels. Who will teach in 26-27, and who will be designing the curriculum, if there even is one?

The particularly surreal thing is that I'm drafting the syllabus for what is to be Lang version of the core course for the soon-to-be approved major in Individualized Studies (formed from the coming together of the university's two self-design Liberal Arts majors). A pilot was supposed to run next semester but - ha! - is likely to be cut for low enrollment. 

But it's the content of the syllabus that's making me rub my eyes, as I imagine acquainting students with the history and philosophy of education, broadly understood, and more narrowly construed "liberal arts" in its various forms - all in the context of the charmingly quixotic school in which they're designing their individualized course of study. I'm more sympathetic than many of my colleagues to the direction the university is heading (explicitly and intensively bridging liberal arts, design and performance), and can narrate it inspiringly as a new chapter in The New School's storied history... but will I be the one telling the story?

More anon! 

Last Metro

It's the end of an era: 

My last MetroCard expired today! 

New York City is moving to a new system called OMNY, which works directly from people's credit cards, smartphones and even watches - though there will still be a card version. There will still be weekly cards, but the monthlies I've been using to gallivant about the city all these years seem fated to be a thing of the past.

Nation of refuge

I can't let the prez's profanation of Thanksgiving, indeed of the whole American idea, go unremarked on. Abandoning refugees on the day we remember the Pilgrim refugees? I don't know why two National Guardsmen were shot, but, beyond deep sorrow for these people whose oaths to serve in the nation's protection were being exploited, it almost doesn't matter. The manically xenophobic response has been so disproportionate and so comprehensive that it's clearly premeditated. The white nationalists in charge have been itching to gut even legal forms of immigration, and have been waiting for a chance to unleash their venom. This dreary predictability makes it no less of an outrage.

Chlorofilibuster

Gold rush

It happens every year, but late fall ginkgos can be quite dramatic. (I remember streets of gold from when I lived closer to street level!)

Bootleg

The "Practicing Curation" class has offered "A Bootleg Exhibition of the Orozco Room" in a naturally lit basement room. They hung textile reproductions of the original murals - inaccessible during a long process of restoration - around a seating area to try to recreate the way the murals were part of social life at The New School in its first decades, at least until the yellow curtain era, described in an explanatory pamphlet. 

It's quite successful in its bootleg way. The reproduced murals are even more immersive than the originals, which sit a little higher on the walls and are ventilated by windows on either side of the "Table of Universal Brotherhood." I wonder if it was also intentionally that the murals to left and right were inverted. I know two students in the class, will ask!