Gen ed bestiary

Each of the teams attending this General Education workshop had to put together a poster describing its school, team, and its gen ed situation. They were encouraged also to use an image of an animal if they could. Ten did. I'm not sure what this bestiary says about this strange animal!

Getting with the program

Well, I almost hate to say this, but I'm having fun at the AAC&U "Gen Ed Boot Camp." It's interesting to learn about the latest trends and best practices in higher education and/though also intimidating to realize how late we are in the game. For various reasons (not all of them bad) New School has managed to avoid articulating general education aims, let alone implementing a curriculum to help students achieve them. Most of the other teams are in the process of revising quarter-century-old regimes, and come battle-scarred from years of struggling to get buy-in from departments, faculty unions, administrators of every stripe, alumni, legislators... We don't have all of those ducks to line up, but it would clearly be a big deal to move from our laid back reliance on "implicit" learning to the kind of articulated and assessable programs everyone else is working on. Would be? Will be! Our accrediting body mandates it!

The journey begins

En route to Baltimore, at a conference hotel near which I'll be spending the next five days. It's for an AAC&U (American Association of Colleges and Universities) Institute on General Education and Assessment, and I'm part of a team of seven from New School. I can't remember when or why I agreed to go, but it's just a few days, and I'll feel not just ready for my Chinese adventure after it, but like I've worked for it!

A well done

The full draft of "The Book of Job: A Biography" is sent off, right on schedule! A relief, indeed a pleasure - many thanks to the patient NL for all his help these last weeks; I couldn't have done it without you.

This land is my land

Funny, the president's coming out in favor of gay marriage didn't touch me the way this one-second shot in the US's first ever official tourism film did. It's a lovely little film, with a great song by Rosanne Cash called "Land of Dreams," and shows all the lovely colors of America. Whoever scripted this scene gets it. The film's other scenes are outdoors and indoors, in nature and culture, individuals, groups... Here's a public trolley, and these guys feel safe enough not just for one to put his arm around the other, but for the other to fall asleep. God bless America.

Pacing

As I make the latest tweaks to the Job book manuscript, I find myself confronting an old question I've never known the answer to. Is it a sign of bad writing if the paragraphs are not all roughly the same length? Worse, of bad thinking? On the other hand, wouldn't it be strange if an argument proceeded in so consistent a way, each step of the way the same size as the others, equally significant? The world and the things in it worth writing about aren't salami waiting to be sliced (not to mention pre-sliced like American cheese), but I must admit that much writing, including much very good writing, has a pleasing rhythm established by standard sized paragraphs.

This is only one of the meta-writing questions which occasionally detain me in pointless procrastinating reverie. One could ask the same about chapter or subsection lengths: is uniformity here a matter of style or substance? And here's another question: Should your most interesting claims come consistently at the beginnings or ends of paragraphs? And another: Should one use the past or the present tense when writing about past thinkers' arguments? And another: Should you ever use "one"?

I know, I know, let the editor decide: back to the manuscript!

Let's eat!

I had a long informative chat with two Chinese women at the India China Institute today about what to expect in Yunnan. I learned about dances and horse-rides and buses and performances but the conversation kept coming back to food. Yunnan is famous for rice noodles, I learned. And mushrooms of many kinds. Something called "stinky tofu" (above, picture source) is famous. They eat all kinds of flowers, and, one added, "worms." While I was figuring out she meant grubs and larvae, she effused that the marvelous biodiversity of Yunnan means they have a wide profusion of them to eat. I think I might pass.

Final edition

I'm becoming a fan of "markup," a feature in Word which lets you see editorial changes and suggestions from multiple sources, adopting or adapting them as you see fit. This is part of the Job manuscript which - yes! - gets sent off on Friday. The blue edits are from my university press editor, the green ones from an accomplished alum I've hired to help me get out of my Yankee Doodle editing tizzy, and the red ones are my own. By the end of the process, all the colored boxes will be gone, as I either accept or reject their advice.

Do be do be bo

Can anyone explain to me what the Book of Job stands for in this, the end of a recent column by David Brooks lamenting the lack of attention to issues of character in a discussion of elite youth about careers?

I saw young people with deep moral yearnings. But they tended to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions; questions about how to be into questions about what to do. 

It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job. 

"The Book of Job" is doing a lot of work here, but I really can't make out what it is. Is it that life is bigger and more tragic than our life choices? Is it that your do-gooder friends might think you a sell-out for joining Morgan Stanley but God knows your character remains good as gold? Or is it that Job shows that you can be good without doing anything? Does the Book of Job just synechdochically represent religion, the Bible, God? I really don't get it.

Chinese villages

Wow, China is, what, two weeks away? I'm putting together my itinerary, seeking out beauty and bustle. For beauty, Unesco World Heritage Site Lijiang (above) seems sure to please, a charming old town so beloved of foreign and domestic tourists that I gather it's growing! Beneath those tiled roofs are shops and b&bs along myriad canals, all festooned with red lanterns.... For bustle I'm going to try to visit one of the "urban villages" in Shenzhen which I learned about from a colleague's work. The remains of the villages and collective farms in this area before it was turned into the nation's biggest economic growth zone, thay have long since replaced fields with poorly built apartment blocks, so chockablock close to each other they're known as "handshake houses," renting to the undocumented migrant laborers who keep the city going. 

Eastward

Reactions to our fashion-religion zine have so far been very encouraging. (If you want me to send you a copy, send me an address before I head out of town this coming Friday.)

I think we're going to keep the project going. Pope Karl be damned, next year's focus will be on Eastern traditions, though that can still address a wide range from (to name two things participants have suggested) the effort to design a single garment "emotionally nutritious" enough that one might wear it for a whole year to "sadhu bling" - the garish wealth with which devotees shower their gurus in India. Spring 2013, most likely! Let us know if you're interested in being part of it.

Goliath wins!

I keep track of "The Simpsons" on Hulu from time to time, and just happened on a recent epsidoe chock full of religion. Season 23, Episode 16 ("Ned 'n Edna's Blend") starts with a passion play - Christ's part played by Homer (!) - and continues with the revelation that über-Christian Ned Flanders and Edna Crabapple, Bart's foul-mouthed elementary school teacher, have wed. Edna takes Rod and Todd out of the Christian school they've been attending, and soon Ned has a nightmare - in "Davey and Goliath" style! It's Todd's graduation from college, but Ned's joy turns to panic when he discovers it's "not a midwestern Bible college but an elite East Coast university!" Mortarboard-clad Toddy reassures him: "It's okay Daddy, I majored in religious studies." But Ned's relief turns to horror as Tod adds ominously: "comparative religious studies!"

How do white people look?

Chicago-based Photographer Myra Greene has a very interesting project going called "My white friends." I read about it here and was struck by her observation: I recognize it when I’m the only black person in a room. My white friends will notice I’m the only black person, too. But they don’t notice a room full of white people. In this series she works with her friends, sometimes photographing them in a naturalistic space, sometimes in a scene where they act out what they think whiteness looks like, sometimes in compositions of her own. Lovely pictures and thought-provoking, using all registers of the photographic medium to raise questions about gaze, social location, privilege, stereotypes, friendship and, of course, photographic practices themselves.

Ouch!

UnReunion

How will we remember our unofficial reunion - posed or quasi-candid?

Graffiti!

And on my rooftop, a new installation, too! And there's a change in the scenery toward Manhattan, too: dome of the Atlantic Yards Stadium.

 

(You may recall I shared a wall with graffiti artists in Melbourne, too...)

Aerial

The latest thing to alight on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum is part of the "Cloud Cities" series of Tomás Saraceno: retro-futurist  modules in reflective and clear material, at whose interstices appear some marvelous crystal-spiderwebby wonders worthy of Haeckel.

At liberty

Saw New York with new-old eyes with several dozen erstwhile classmates from the United World College of the American West, some of whom I have not seen in decades, and thought of in even longer...  

it's a strange thing, a reunion's mix of the presumption that you remember and care about everyone back then, but aren't really committed to more than pleasantries now. 

 

I was very happy to reconnect with some friends I'd not seen in a while, though, and to learn about the M&M and Lego shops in Midtown.



Coda, Sunday night:

That sounds ungracious. I'm happy everyone came. Our UWC family is just that, and we keep track of each other in a way no other community quite does. I felt that strongly on Sunday morning when we released a white balloon for each of several classmates and faculty members who have passed away. The first rose quickly and headed west: "toward New Mexico," we all said or thought. A second became briefly entangled on a vent on the building at left, but someone said "he's waiting for Roger," the dedicatee of the following balloon, and so it was, somehow managing to disentangle itself in time to fly away together.

Age of longing

Today was Lang graduation, which always leaves me feeling strangely empty. Why is that? It might be the artificiality of us all dressing up in hired pseudo-medieval regalia and acting out some scene from a bad movie in a rented church - a space which hasn't had any part in anyone's experiences moving toward graduation. (We've outgrown the church on our block, so this is an unfamiliar neighborhood too.) There used to be a nudge-nudge-wink-wink quality to it, heightened by the presence of a fusty brass ensemble playing Renaissance music, as if all the assembled family members didn't know how unlike conventional schools we are... Now it feels more like the joke's on all of us in higher ed.

It might be from realizing how few of the graduates I know. Although I recognize more students than I used to, mainly because of the first year program and my faithful attendance of theater and dance performances, there still seemed a lot fewer than one might feel entitled to expect for all the teaching one does. (Not quite half of the students in my first year seminar eight semesters ago were there...) It can't be, surely, that studying with me makes people leave without graduating?! But it does in any case confirm how small a part what we Religious Studies folks do plays in most Lang students' careers.

It might also be the sense that the future's pretty scary for graduates - and has been for several years. Whatever we've done for our students, it's not enough to assure them bright prospects. I think our dean was trying to be both realistic and encouraging when she mentioned a talk she'd heard about the alternative economy of barter and sharing in Spain, where over 40% of young people are unemployed, but it's a pretty cold comfort. Our faculty speaker was trying, too, in a paean to Occupy Wall Street, the most "incandescent" political moment he's experienced (he's my age, "born too late" for the sixties), and the important contributions made to it by The New School and its students. OWS was huge for many students last semester. But I'm afraid most students will instead remember his rather grim observation that every generation has a right to have illusions of innocence, but this generation has been denied even that.

He also mentioned that he'd had several "surreal" conversations with graduating seniors contemplating their next steps, and that certainly rang true for me too. I've had many such, and with recent graduates too, who are in limbo, uncertain where to turn. We faculty are happy-sad to see students go and very happy when they come back to visit, but it's just sad when they come back in perplexity.

There's also the melancholy of the passage of time itself, which I felt most keenly seeing a student who was in the Religion and Theater class two years ago, standing with her mother and sister. I remembered that her father passed away the semester she was in our class. I'm sure they were missing him something terrible. Moments like these make not just the passage of time but its ineluctability palpable.

I'm not sure what it says (a good thing, surely), but the only really inspiring words were spoken by the student speaker. It was the most serious and best-crafted such talk I can remember and, starting in something like the scary dizziness of this moment, rose to a sober but real hopefulness. He began with Kierkegaard's argument that it's from despair than authenticity becomes possible. There followed an amazing ode to what we do, in the liberal arts and at The New School, a diverse community of individuals "not willing to settle for a life of falsity." Imagine that - a talk about the liberating power of truth and its pursuit, in 2012! Turns out we've been equipping people for lives of truth and meaning after all, and in the best way. He quoted a line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry which perfectly characterizes what we are about:

If you want to [teach people how to] build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Wise and empowering words for an age of longing.

Congratulations and best of luck to all the members of the class of 2012! Our best wishes go with you as you voyage on. You'll find the way.

Budding

The Central Park Conservatory Garden after a rain.