Windless snow idyll

Icing

Thought we might make up for this winter's snow deficit by repairing to our Adirondack hideaway and weren't disappointed. A storm which kindly defied the forecast and started only after we arrived produced almost 30cm of perfect powder last night and into this morning...

Inhuman age?

This week's New Yorker contained a long article on "The End of the English Major." Author Nathan Heller, himself an English major, surveys the apparent collapse of English and other humanities majors across American higher education. 

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent ... What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. 

Heller considers various explanations proffered to explain the shift, and visits Arizona State and Harvard, his alma mater, to provide snapshots of universities now in thrall to STEM. I'm familiar with the broader arguments, if not with the particular centers and shiny buildings he visits. But as he went on (it's a long article) I found myself wanting something Heller never bothers to explain: why should anyone major in English in the first place?

I feel quite the philistine even asking this question. I love the pleasures of texts and I understand myself as a scholar of the humanities but have tended toward things that point beyond literary study - philosophy, politics and economics, then religious studies, with some anthropology and geography along the way. Sure, religion is as made-up as literature, but I approach it as a way of attuning oneself - body, soul, society - with the real. I've often quipped that the religious studies and interdisciplinary science types at my college get on so well because, unlike the rest of the curriculum, our courses seek a reality beyond the limits of human artifice and interpretation. (And yes, I know that you never get beyond those limits, especially when you think you have...)

Many of the arguments for the common good of citizens getting an "education in the human past" are compelling to me, but precisely as things that every college student should be getting. The liberal arts ideal is something you shouldn't have to major in a humanities subject to get. I'm chilled by the true philisitinism of those critics of American higher education who reject the critical and self-aware gifts of humanistic learning in favor of a narrow and naive conception of virtue (more "Christian" than civic) and want to prohibit teaching that might make students feel uncomfortable about living in and, in many cases, benefiting from an unjust society. But again: why should the number of literature or humanities majors be the measure of success here? Wouldn't it be as good, even better, if everyone minored in a humanities subject?

In fact, the numbers of humanities majors has never been that high ...

For decades, the average proportion of humanities students in every class hovered around fifteen per cent nationally, following the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods. 

... though recent years suggest a new pattern. 

Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller coaster is in free fall.

I'm not sure a decade is statisticaly significant, but for what it's worth, religion majors appear to be dwindling faster than English, indeed almost as fast as the biggest loser history majors - as we've known for years. (I remember doom and gloom a dozen years ago!) But again, why are majors the measure?) What's wrong with majoring in something you think will place you in a good job? Heller's piece has produced a wave of people successful in all sorts of fields coming out has having been English majors, and we often say that your particular major matters less than having a liberal arts degree, which makes you adaptable, open to complexity, good at collaboration and communication. Shouldn't the benefits, in maturity, responsibility and a reflective understanding of the human condition, be everyone's? I suppose advanced literary study gives you something above and beyond that... but what? (The collapse in history majors seems to me a greater civilizational crisis.)

I know, I know. As majors fall, faculty lines are reapportioned. We hear about the closure of humanities departments at one school or another practically evey week. Fewer humanists in the professoriate (as opposed to the growing ranks of contingent faculty teaching general education curricula) change the tenor of faculty discussions, diminishing the otherworldly call of learning for learning's sake, maybe weakening the position of the university as a source of wisdom, new knowledge and lateral thinking for society as a whole. 

So: decline in liberal arts aspirations and achievements, a problem I'm all over. But a decline in literature majors? Heller reports that my neighbor Columbia's has seen a halving in their English majors between 2002 and 2020, from 10% of their graduating class to 5%. I'm still astonished by the 10%. What were those students thinking? 

Listing

I used ChatGPT in class today, albeit to break its spell. Our topic was the world religions paradigm, and I started by asking the class "What are the world religions?" Predictably we ended up with a list which began with

Christianity

Buddhism

Islam

Hinduism

Judaism

and then continued with Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Daoism, Jainism. Those first five recur everywhere you look for accounts of religion in public life, including materials we've 

encountered in class but fall apart when you start to consider just what they're supposed to represent. The biggest omission is of course anything from the Americas, Africa or Oceania - how is it that nobody notices that? Another problem is the inclusion of the rather tiny religion of Judaism, but this is a ticklish point to make in a culture where anti-semitism is alive and well. (Fror the record it was Protestant scholars who came up with the world religions paradigm.) 

Rather than dwell on the messy and opaque history of the "big five," I shared Tomoko Masuzawa's claim that the world religions somehow came fully formed into existence at the end of the nineteenth century, and have become a kind of unexamined common sense ever since. But how to challenge that common sense in a short lecture?

I said I'd asked someone conversant with contemporary debates...

and showed the response I got when I asked ChatGPT the same question. Many in the class recognized the template right away. Eight religions? This was too many! (Though the inclusion of Baha'i at #7 was interesting.) But ChatGPT is eager to please and if you don't like what you get you can ask it again and get a different response/

The second time through I got six: the big five and Sikhism - as #5 in fact. ChatGPT seemed to think world religion status was just about number of adherents. That's not quite right. I asked one more time.

This time I got ten! Ten? (How on earth could Shinto be a world religion?) I didn't linger over the particulars; students got the absurdity of the project. Common sense was teerering...

After a fourth query, I gave up, I told them. Eight again? (But now Taoism has taken Baha'i's place.) Read carefully these four ChatGPT responses were in fact all giving the same information packaged differently, and all of them were missing the "big five" construct. 

Not that I was endorsing the big five! My hope is that the intuitive trustworthiness of the big five and ChatGPT cancelled each other out, along the way revealing the absurdity of supposing that the full range of human religions could be represented by a short list of Eurasian religions of any length. We were ready to get into the weeds.

Dusting

Squeaking in just before the end of February, a little snow at last.

Faithful accessory

I'm going to be part of this event, although religious studies doesn't quite have a clear niche between "fashion, faith, and philosophy"; I'm part of the conversation called "Challenges"! (Also on the panel is my co-conspirator from the "Belief Systems" zine 11 years ago, a rather more sophisticated project, so I'll be fine.) I told the other organizers that this illustration, designed by someone's friend prompted by this project, looked like the ecumenical COEXIST bumper sticker come to life. "Is that a good thing?" someone asked. Should be interesting...!

Higher education in society

I do hope we have a chance to teach a full-length version of our "What is college for?" course at some point. There's another fragment coming up in a few weeks, which will focus on self-designed liberal arts majors. But there are so many issues in the topic of the first one, "Higher education in society," that we barely caught a whiff of. 

But for those paying attention, there were whiffs. The thing I have in mind right now starts with the problem of the spiraling cost of higher ed in the the US, and the concomitant crisis of student debt. One of the student groups was tasked with thinking of responses, and they came up with a few.

One of the students had listened to a podcast we assigned the week before on the significance of Biden's debt forgiveness program. But none considered, perhaps because they got together to plan their presentation before or instead of reading it, one of our assigned texts for the final class, a related essay entitled "The return of college as a common good" from The Chronicle of Higher Education. (It's behind a paywall; I can send you a pdf if you're interested.) Why should not society pay for higher education?

This essay narrates how recently college has come to be thought of as a private investment of individuals (and their families), valuable even if it involves debt, and suggests that the tide may be turning again. But it only scratches the surface of what it might involve to think of college as a "common good" - the thinking behind not just the land grant and other state universities steadily defunded in our time, but the whole earlier history of universities we learned about in our first session, which told how political rulers and cities and churches and states and empires established - and funded - universities. But perhaps it didn't come to our students because they understand their own college careers in such privatized ways. "Public" or "common goods" are hard to even conceive in a neoliberal world.

To get students to appreciate what thinking of higher education as a common good might entail, one could use another of the texts we assigned for our last class, a description of the convening of Te Wānanga o Raukawa, an institution of "higher level Maori learning" in Aotearoa New Zealand. The university isn't the first or last part of a broad and longstanding effort to revive and sustain traditional Maori ways. An undated paper entitled "Leaders Are Made Not Just Born" explains how as part of imagining a thriving Maori community, they decided they needed people educated for various specialized roles:

The New School offers degrees in only two of these. For what projects are the things we teach a common good - if indeed they are? And should society invest in all the many majors offered in American universities? Business? Philosophy? Product design? Classics? Sports management? Literature? Dance? Communications? Computer game design? Anthropology? A few additional steps are required to make the argument that society should subsidize whatever students choose to major in, from advertising to zoology, and it would be valuable to tease them out. (There might be several ways to make the case.)

Maybe this will come up when we explore the world of self-designed liberal arts degrees, all of which have high-minded rationales...

Curation

Brilliant juxtaposition at the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase: George Segal's "Appalachian Farm Couple, 1936" (1978) and Whitfield Lovell's "Bringer" (1999). Both are based on photographs, Segal's on one by Ben Shahn for the WPA, Lovell's on one of the found photographs of unnamed African Americans his work memorializes.

Out of body experience

For the final session of our intensive mini-course "What is college for? Higher education in society" we spent most of our time workshopping student presentations on challenges identified last week: "affordability and access," "theory and practice and the relationship of what happens inside and outside the classroom," "inclusion and making space for all voices," "making invisible problems visible," and the "relationship of academic freedom to liberation." Groups were tasked with articulating the problem and considering possible solutions and related issues and, considering how little time we've had together, came up with some interesting ideas. Ideas from our first two sessions provided critical context but much of the content, perhaps inevitably, came from students' own experiences at The New School.

What we didn't have time for was any discussion of to three inspiring alternative institutions of higher education which we'd shared information about. Perhaps students will find themselves remembering them in future discussions? For me, reading them again and together was a slightly out of body experience.

The first, a Maori-led institution dating to 1981 and discussed in one of last week's texts (A Third University is Possible), is so compellingly local in its orientation and grounding in the indigenous values and communities of Aotearoa New Zealand that it challenges one to surface the forgotten and perhaps obsolete values and communities undergirding "the University" in the west: a huge task, and important.

The other two came at us as reincarnations of aspects of The New School. One, the 2012-founded Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, takes its name from the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung with which the New School for Social Research has long been confused, but its project is like the original New School. They aspire to be

an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Holding courses both online and in person (in partnership with local businesses and cultural organizations), we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century. 

Like the original New School, BISR doesn't offer degrees or plan to, but rather proposes that college-level education can and should be part of the lifelong learning of engaged citizens. They offer new courses on classic and emergent topics to fit with changing times.

Our third inspirational case is the newest, and also refers to itself as the "New School," though its full name is New School of the Anthropocene. Their words really sing! 

The New School was ... founded by an ensemble of experienced academics from the higher educational world alongside artists and practitioners, none of whom regard education as a business and their students as customers. 

We recognise the pitiless financialisation of the university world and the dismal situation of the student-consumer, for whom vast debt is a passport for crossing the threshold to adulthood and social participation. We observe the demoralisation of exploited teachers within a casualised workforce whose energies are drained by a technocratic culture of audit and administration. We witness the purposeful and systematic dismantling of adult education, the crude instrumentalisation of learning and a joyless culture of accreditation. 

Collectively we can do better. We see that higher educational institutions in their current form are ill-placed to foster the new critical and creative ways of working collaboratively that are necessary for social renewal and ecological recovery.

Among their provocations is an alternative genealogy. While they do offer a diploma, they appeal not to the heritage of "the University" but to a wildly eclectic group of settings for reflection and renewal, including Black Mountain College, caves, Nalanda, Paris 8, Irish hedge schools and a newly founded university in Kurdish Syria.

Taken together, these living alternative visions of "what college is for" might make one wonder whether the sorts of ideals driving The New School founders haven't so much been defeated by the gravitational drag of "the University" as moved on to other edgy, urgent and emergent constellations. 

Food for thought! As they gather their thoughts for a final reflection (due Monday), maybe some of our students will realize how exciting these experiments are. And, once you move beyond assuming the answer to questions of higher education's place in society has to be some or other kind of university, how available!

After history

In "After Religion" today I asked the students a question they didn't understand. I was trying to get from the wobbles in secularization theory, our topic last week, to an understanding that for religious nationalists the story of religion isn't over: for them the rise of the religiously unaffiliated is not an inevitability but a battle lost in a culture war they expect to win. I was working toward this slide

which can be read many ways. First: wow, whatever is being measured is falling quickly! Next: wow, it was really high not long ago, though... and what was it? Golly: large if falling numbers of Americans still think that "God has granted America a special role in human history"! My failed google.doc prompt was an attempt to get at the same issue in a not explicitly religion-related way. 

But - depending on precisely such things as whether you think the United States is "God's own country" - you can also read the graph as a call to arms. Those declining lines need to be pushed upward again, and can be if American schools (and universities) teach patriotism rather than nihilism, "traditional values" rather than relativism... (At this point I may have said some intemperate things about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' multi-pronged attacks on public education.)

But maybe I'm not being fair to the students, or myself. Their responses to the question equivocated in ways of which I approve. There is no way to account for all of the parts of our history, wrote one, and therefore, there is no way to clearly, objectively choose what is the most important/main direction and purpose. Another wrote that they feel like all history is important. it’s about understanding and learning the history that creates its direction/purpose. There are times and places that are important to people because of their personal connections/fascinations. 

Many noted wrily that people crave the idea of one big purpose - may even be lost without one. Wrote one student, It is comforting to imagine ourselves as the focal point of the universe, and just for a second hope that maybe we do have some sort of agency. Otherwise I find it very overwhelming that we may be here for no reason at all. But many others found comfort in more modest meanings. The direction and purpose for human history doesn't necessarily have to be collective objective rather than personal, another opined; I think that by addressing it as a collective task it leads to forms of oppression and manipulation.

There were a few answers to the question as posed - our purpose here is very basic, make relationships, be kind, help others as often as you can or to try and make life better for the next generation or to continually create a “Beloved Community” or, on the other hand perhaps the main purpose of human beings as a species is evolution in all aspects, indeed I have a friend that thinks humans were put here by the universe to try and figure itself out. Others saw the question itself as problematic, as History is written and remembered by the winner. Some observed that We only focus on modern history, since so much was erased as it was discovered by the West; in fact, argued another, I think the direction thing is a tool used to justify colonialism in the name of “the chosen people.” Another worried: can purpose and direction be separated from capitalist work-ethic thinking? How can we ground ourselves in a different type of purpose?

There's no consensus here, but there is a general refusal to entertain the possibility of the kind of history in which a particular people, a particular nation, even a particular time may be of special significance. That's all to the good, though, isn't it? Why do I feel like something important may have been missed? Do I want them to understand the threat religious nationalism represents by being tempted by it? Do I want them to find a counter-narrative as big and empowering as the reactionaries'? Maybe I'm underestimating the power of their pluralism, skepticism and humility to see a destiny beyond the hubristic lures of American or even human exceptionalism.

Precipitation

Our bit of the big storm was pretty, but still not snow...

Cloistered

Uptown happenings

Early adapters

Different universities are possible

"What is college for? Higher education in society" took a deep dive today into the most trenchant American critiques of higher education. Intrepid teams of students presented

• Paulo Freire's ideas on how education can entrench oppression by rendering its students objects or humanize them and allow them to discern a future beyod oppression from their own experience

• bell hooks' arguments for the importance of both wholeness - of students and teachers both - and theory in a truly trasnsformative feminist classroom

• Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's rhapsodies on the prophetic work of the community of the university's marginalized "maroon" educators, the "undercommons," and 

• la paperson's chastening call for a "third university" undoing the work of the colonial "first" and the self-indulgently utopian "second universities" with their "scrap material"

None of these classics of radical educational thinking is easy to read, and each could sustain much deeper engagement, but I think the class got highlights and, as important, a sense of a tradition: hooks (1994) builds on Freire (1968), Moten and Harney (2003) read hooks and Freire, la paperson (2017) works with the ideas of all these predecessors. And if we didn't get into the subtleties, we could sense an ongoing effort to imagine education as "a practice of freedom" (Friere, hooks), even as we came to understand the ways in which it more naturally protects an unjust status quo from true change.

This was not all! A final team of students shared with us an analysis of the US-specific problem of student debt, and of the ways in which it disproportionately handicaps African American families. And a colleague central to the international "Platform Cooperative" movement told us about a cooperative university he spent time at in the Basque country, inspiring in some ways, a reality check in others. 

There are no easy fixes for higher education, but we've made clear why it matters to think beyond what we've got now. In our final session next week (three sessions is so few, but what a lot you can still do in them - especially if the students are game!) we'll look at a handful of experimental alternative universities around the world, and read an article arguing for again understanding higher education as a common good, rather than the privatized individual investment it has become in the US. We'll gather our thoughts on the most pressing challenges, and what hopes we can see for tackling them.

We'll pass this on, our contribution to our school's soul-searching.

Belated Valentine

 Rain helps the colors of the Lang courtyard maple buds pop!

Budding

Coming into focus: we may be on to spring without having had winter!

Undead

Trotted out the dead white men in "After Religion" today, as part of a rather overambitious overview of secularization as a god that failed, secularism as an imperfect and embattled political ideal, and secularity as the frame of contemporary spiritual subjectivity. 

It was introduced by Nietzsche's famous claim that "God is dead" and underscored by an attempted coup de théâtre. There's a whiteboard on wheels in the lecture hall, and at one point I casually spun it around to reveal a famous piece of bathroom grafitti:

GOD IS DEAD - Nietzsche

NIETZSCHE IS DEAD - God

This wasn't the last word, of course. Indeed, we had a google.doc asking the question Time magazine put on its cover in 1966, in the heyday of "death of God theology," which provoked some interesting reflection on what was and is and can be alive in the first place. 

What God (sic) makes of all this is anyone's guess!

Gnarly

Generative

The first assignment for the students in "After Religion" is a "Multi-generational spiritual portrait": 2-3 page narrative of your religious/spiritual affiliations and/or disaffiliations over three generations, past and/or future. Can be fictional and need not prioritize “family.” The caveats at the end are recognition that "family" isn't the only form of important intergenerational relationship, and acknowledgment that their life stories are nobody's business unless they care to share them. In class I framed this last in terms of being "half American," with my other half regularly shocked at the ease with which Americans think they can ask people personal questions. (True to form, when I described this to an American colleague who teaches courses in spirituality, I was met with a blank stare.)

I've been assigning this exercise since the course started but, since assignments are handed in to the graduate students leading the discussion sections, I've never seen what students come up with. (The discussion leaders' reports indicated it was fruitful, and got students thinking about religious/spiritual things as inheritances and discoveries in the context of relationships and history.) This time around, I was sitting in on one of the discussion sections as the class discussed the assignment, which many described as more interesting and more difficult than they expected. Everyone who spoke recounted their family's religious history, one venturing conjecturally into the future should they have a child. One discovered that their father thinks of himself as a "cafeteria Catholic," a term the sudent hadn't heard before; "so what does that make me?" 

Students at The New School who signed up for a class called "After Religion" are of course a self-selecting group, but generally they reported themselves unrooted in traditions which their parents already distanced themselves from. A child of a mixed marriage described exploring a third religion before settling into atheism. Another told how their sibling had leaned into the family's faith tradition while they drifted away. Several described being surprised to find their grandparents were devout. Overall what they shared aligned with the standard narrative of generational change in American religion/postreligion - progressive disaffiliation. 

I got more out of the assignment this year, too (perhaps because I was aware as I haven't as clearly been before that I'm their parents' generation). I was a little disappointed that none chose the fictional option, so I decided (since this is 2022) to ask the latest free AI making waves, ChatGPT. Here's what it came up with.

Uncanny (this required no time to generate) but perhaps a little cliché, I thought, so I asked to "Regenerate response" a few times. There were enough differences, within an overall sameness, to be uncanny in a whole new way. (This was my first experiment was ChatGPT.)

The overall narrative was always the same, though details varied.

My hunch that this generation's sense of the flow of history away from organized religion is widely shared was confirmed (or was the AI picking up only on news reports about the rise of the "nones"?). ChatGPT isn't in the business of making up new things after all, just repackaging old ones. But I did get some fun narratives when I asked specifically for three generations starting in the present. 

From a sociology of religion perspective, ChatGPT was getting things right, but I also started to notice a persistently irenic flavor to closing paragraphs; a friend who works in IT told me that this was doubtless part of the ChatGPT algorithm.

Still, what had I discovered? That the progressive disaffiliation narrative is true? ChatGPT was distilling down everything available... though I'll have to try with differently worded prompts (without jargon like "affiliation/disaffiliation"!) to see if it the results vary. But still, the sociological studies I had in mind were about the United States, which sometimes observed that the US was finally lining up with the experiences of other complex industrialized societies, but generally abstracted from broader global patterns. Did my English language question distort my result? I'll try in some other languages...

Unsure what to make of all this, I asked some friends who came to dinner on Friday about it. (Actually, I read them the second one above before identifying it as AI-generated.) Should I tell the class, I asked? Before we got there, a friend picked up on my recounting that students had described the assignment as difficult. That wouldn't be the case for African Americans, she thought, who have an abiding sense of ancestors. And what about recent immigrants, where the dramatically different experiences of successive generations are hard to overlook? And the ever increasing number of families that bridge and weave together cultures and religions? The ChatGPT narrative seems very ... white. Or was it the way I was posing the question?

Aha, a slight change in the prompt and ChatGPT contains the entropy and offers not just a harmonious future but a family religious identity stronger and more resilient than ever. I wonder what (different) lode of sources the AI tapped into for this one?

Folks in education are all thinking of ways we can coopt ChatGPT (if you can't beat 'em join 'em!) and I think I might have found one. What question do you have to ask it to get a story that rings true to you?