Something a little kinky is happening on a leaf of the sage plant in our window box.
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Friday, September 28, 2018
From Russia with love
Here's another fun discovery from the New School archives. I'd helped them locate a complete set of The Figure in the Carpet, which fashioned itself the nation's first magazine of literary prose, from 1927-28 - all work by pioneering writing instructor Gorham Munson and his students. When I went in to have a look at the four issues, I was introduced to the successor journal, Salient, which ran for six! I skimmed the contents of both journals. The latter one includes poetry, and catty commentary on other literary journals as well as the stories, reviews and fragments of various sorts in Figures. I was drawn to a story by an Oakley Johnson in Salient's second issue (January 1929) which tells of a down and out writer who lives near the construction for the 8th Avenue subway on 14th Street with Rodin's The Thinker and the Buddha, the former ever morosely doubting himself, the latter taking all things in with bemused equanimity - and a smoke.
Interesting crowd, the Chelsea New School! I was struck that Salient features prominent advertisements for the Amalgamated Bank's Travel Department, one ad entitled ... why intelligent Americans will include RUSSIA in their trip next summer appeared several times, and then the one above, which speaks of Your Relatives and Friends in RUSSIA. Meanwhile, a New School Travel Club offered an opportunity for small groups of five or more to tour Russia and France.
Which students had friends and relatives in Russia? The first Leaflet (in 1920) had a breakdown of the New School's then students. Russians are the biggest group of foreign born "regular students" (32 of 77 foreign, of a total 381) and number 62 of 148 "special students" (who came in groups, usually from labor unions). But there's no reason to think the student body was the same a decade later, times - and course offerings - having changed a lot. And many of these "Russians" will surely have been Russian Jews... Still so much to find out!
Thursday, September 27, 2018
So many lovely Jesuits
Our evening devoted to the Met's "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" show was a blast. A member of the curatorial team (who also teaches at Parsons) took us through the exhibit with well-chosen slides and fascinating stories. Then she, the director of the BFA in Fashion and I had a wonderful conversation - followed by Q&A.
Such fun to hear how the exhibition came together (who knew that the original idea had been fashion and the "five world religions," taking viewers on a pilgrimage through the entire museum?), and about the intended and unintended ways the art, architecture and garments interacted! Lots of things I'd noticed (and not noticed) suddenly made compelling sense: I'm going back for another look before it closes.
Most of the audience (SRO in a room that seats forty) came from the fashion programs, so I took several opportunities to talk up religious studies. We're interested in the "Catholic imagination" too, I said, and think that too many people's understanding of religion is Protestant. I even dropped Robert Orsi's his idea that Catholics experience some events as supersaturated with meaning (his word is "abundant"). This fits with a quotation from sociologist Andrew Greeley, which framed both the exhibition and tonight's presentation:
Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are merely hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility that inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation.
Interestingly, though, we heard nothing about enchantment, about things, about sensibility or a lurking Holy. Instead, the "Catholic imagination" was explained in terms of stories - Catholic stuff is full of narratives! I was wondering what this had to do with Greeley, who, at least in this quotation, doesn't mention stories at all. When I looked back at my pictures from the exhibition, I found his ideas had indeed been translated into narrative (and metaphor):
Greeley points beyond the surface of "paraphernalia"to a sensibility attuned to the Holy lurking in abundant events. The next line from this, the book's self-description, is a little less gothic: The world of the Catholic is haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of Grace. But exhibition curator Andrew Bolton doesn't go as far. Imagery and symbolism are on the surface, but below "explicit Catholic imagery and symbolism" we find "a reliance on storytelling, and specifically on metaphor." Our presenter, sharing discussions with people from designers to curators to exhibition visitors, including "so many lovely Jesuits," spoke only of stories.
That translates well to the work of fashion designers. It might have worked well for an exhibition on fashion and religion more generally, too. But is it still Catholic without the haunted, enchanted, grace-filled world of abundant objects that demand (and exceed) story and metaphor?
Among the questions we'd prepared for our guest was this:
How was the "Catholic imagination" idea made understandable to non-Catholic (or non-religious) members of the curatorial team? Were there “secular” translations, analogs?
I think we got our answer.
Such fun to hear how the exhibition came together (who knew that the original idea had been fashion and the "five world religions," taking viewers on a pilgrimage through the entire museum?), and about the intended and unintended ways the art, architecture and garments interacted! Lots of things I'd noticed (and not noticed) suddenly made compelling sense: I'm going back for another look before it closes.
Most of the audience (SRO in a room that seats forty) came from the fashion programs, so I took several opportunities to talk up religious studies. We're interested in the "Catholic imagination" too, I said, and think that too many people's understanding of religion is Protestant. I even dropped Robert Orsi's his idea that Catholics experience some events as supersaturated with meaning (his word is "abundant"). This fits with a quotation from sociologist Andrew Greeley, which framed both the exhibition and tonight's presentation:
Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are merely hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility that inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation.
Interestingly, though, we heard nothing about enchantment, about things, about sensibility or a lurking Holy. Instead, the "Catholic imagination" was explained in terms of stories - Catholic stuff is full of narratives! I was wondering what this had to do with Greeley, who, at least in this quotation, doesn't mention stories at all. When I looked back at my pictures from the exhibition, I found his ideas had indeed been translated into narrative (and metaphor):
Greeley points beyond the surface of "paraphernalia"to a sensibility attuned to the Holy lurking in abundant events. The next line from this, the book's self-description, is a little less gothic: The world of the Catholic is haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of Grace. But exhibition curator Andrew Bolton doesn't go as far. Imagery and symbolism are on the surface, but below "explicit Catholic imagery and symbolism" we find "a reliance on storytelling, and specifically on metaphor." Our presenter, sharing discussions with people from designers to curators to exhibition visitors, including "so many lovely Jesuits," spoke only of stories.
That translates well to the work of fashion designers. It might have worked well for an exhibition on fashion and religion more generally, too. But is it still Catholic without the haunted, enchanted, grace-filled world of abundant objects that demand (and exceed) story and metaphor?
Among the questions we'd prepared for our guest was this:
How was the "Catholic imagination" idea made understandable to non-Catholic (or non-religious) members of the curatorial team? Were there “secular” translations, analogs?
I think we got our answer.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
On the town
Monday, September 24, 2018
Sunday, September 23, 2018
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Deck the halls
Poking around the amazing collection of things which the New School Archives have digitized I found these pictures of lecture halls - one from
the original campus on far West 23rd Street in Chelsea (I've seen it only in a sketch before), the other the very room we taught our first New
School history course in, A404 in the building on West 12th Street, whose windows have sadly been long covered up with wood paneling.
the original campus on far West 23rd Street in Chelsea (I've seen it only in a sketch before), the other the very room we taught our first New
School history course in, A404 in the building on West 12th Street, whose windows have sadly been long covered up with wood paneling.
Friday, September 21, 2018
Beating a retreat
R, a friend who is committed in a very serious way to the silent meditation retreats at Insight Meditation Society's center in Massachusetts, came to visit "Lives of Contemplation" today, and led a wonderfully rich and suggestive discussion about the idea and practice of retreats more generally. (We learned to understand Yom Kippur, where one stages one's own death, as a retreat, too.) IMS is where I went for my one nine-day Buddhist retreat - I remember it so vividly I can't quit believe that was ten years ago.
I was astonished, and in a way grateful, to hear R describe a disconcerting experience I had had - finding that I'd fashioned a life story for each of my fellow meditators, unfettered by any actual exchanges or even eye contact, which was shattered when, on the penultimate day, we were permitted to break our silence and speak. But where I found people more, well, prosaic than I'd imagined and longed to return to a silence uncomplicated by their actual lives and personalities, R told of the delightful surprise when a man who had seemed bitter and unkind turned out to have the warmest smile.
And that triggered a memory I'd lost, for I, too, had been confounded and delighted at people's smiles, having only seen (half-seen!) their expressionless faces for so long - faces I then recognized had been at a kind of rest our ordinary lives barely permit. On the other hand I think I'm also remembering a strongly physical awareness that my own smile muscles were working for the first time in a long time, a little rusty! I wonder why I forgot those charmed discoveries, remembering only my misanthropy? Perhaps, like R, I should have returned for another sit.
I was astonished, and in a way grateful, to hear R describe a disconcerting experience I had had - finding that I'd fashioned a life story for each of my fellow meditators, unfettered by any actual exchanges or even eye contact, which was shattered when, on the penultimate day, we were permitted to break our silence and speak. But where I found people more, well, prosaic than I'd imagined and longed to return to a silence uncomplicated by their actual lives and personalities, R told of the delightful surprise when a man who had seemed bitter and unkind turned out to have the warmest smile.
And that triggered a memory I'd lost, for I, too, had been confounded and delighted at people's smiles, having only seen (half-seen!) their expressionless faces for so long - faces I then recognized had been at a kind of rest our ordinary lives barely permit. On the other hand I think I'm also remembering a strongly physical awareness that my own smile muscles were working for the first time in a long time, a little rusty! I wonder why I forgot those charmed discoveries, remembering only my misanthropy? Perhaps, like R, I should have returned for another sit.
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Angels on a pincushion
One of the curators of the Met's blockbuster exhibition on "fashion and the Catholic imagination" is coming to visit us next week. (It's their #3 most popular show ever, after Mona Lisa in 1963 and King Tut in 1978-79.) We'll be co-hosting together with the Fashion Studies Program at Parsons - a stylish new combo which might come out swinging.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Finding more than yourself
I found a "Statement of Purpose" in a New School catalog from 1960 which I rather liked. Learning as a "common enterprise of student and teacher" is rather nice, and it only gets better from them there, inviting students to "find more than themselves"! And not just in "science and the arts" but "beyond the finite through philosophy and religion."
I posted this on FaceBook and one of my colleagues remarked wryly "Paul Tillich's pubic prominence, e. g." So you can imagine the pleasure I took in then posting this special lecture series from that very catalog.
(Tillich was in fact on the initial list of endangered scholars invited to the University in Exile.) What spectacular lecture titles! "Ambiguity as a universal character of life," 'Self-integration of life and the ambiguities of centeredness," "Self-creation of life and the ambiguities of growth" and "Self-transcendence of life and the ambiguities of the sublime"!
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Monday, September 17, 2018
Mushrooming
Ever newsworthy, The New School was on the front page of the New
York Times for John Cage's course on mushroom identification in Summer 1958. The course proved such a hit it ran five times!
York Times for John Cage's course on mushroom identification in Summer 1958. The course proved such a hit it ran five times!
(Source)
Sunday, September 16, 2018
Saturday, September 15, 2018
Not so straightforward
A recipe we found browsing online offered an unexpected aftertaste. The recipe is for "Cumin-Roasted Salmon with Cilantro Sauce." But a great fan of the recipe (whose remarks 25 other readers found helpful) substituted out almost everything! (Culantro apparently is an herb somewhat similar in taste to cilantro
but much tougher and perhaps ten times as pungent - no wonder the sauce
exploded in the mouth.)
This put me in mind of how I used to use such friendly amendments to recipes as an illustration of lived religion. What's intriguing isn't just that someone bowdlerized a recipe (and was praised for it), but that this virtuoso thinks they've actually cooked it in the first place. And that the obvious next step isn't to try to give the original ingredients a try, but to further improve the ersatz version forced by circumstance!
This put me in mind of how I used to use such friendly amendments to recipes as an illustration of lived religion. What's intriguing isn't just that someone bowdlerized a recipe (and was praised for it), but that this virtuoso thinks they've actually cooked it in the first place. And that the obvious next step isn't to try to give the original ingredients a try, but to further improve the ersatz version forced by circumstance!
Friday, September 14, 2018
Rooting around
In my sophomore tutorial "Lives of Contemplation" this morning, we looked at the charming "Tree of Contemplative Practices" of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, designed by Maia Duerr. It's a nice enough representation of a range of spiritual technologies, most originating in religious traditions, now available for secular use.
I was ready to talk about what the underlying "secular ethics and secular spirituality" might means, as well as what such a tree image conveys, explicitly or surreptitiously, but one of the students did me one better, discovering that there was an earlier version of the tree which didn't scrub these practices of their religious origins: sand mandala, centering prayer, Sufi dancing, insight meditation, gathas, tonglen, metta, Shabbat, vision quest... (Still marked by particularity in the new tree: lectio divina, yoga, Aikido, Qigong, t'ai chi ch'uan.) Ceremonies and rituals based in a cultural or religious tradition has become a lower-hanging branch including only spiritual or cultural traditions.
The tree-image question stands: is religion the root, which eventually produces secular fruits? Or, as implied here, is religion a phase in a longer, basically secular story - roots and trunk are secular (communion, connection, awareness). Some branches might be religious, but leaves and fruit, now that the tree has grown some more, are secular again?
I was ready to talk about what the underlying "secular ethics and secular spirituality" might means, as well as what such a tree image conveys, explicitly or surreptitiously, but one of the students did me one better, discovering that there was an earlier version of the tree which didn't scrub these practices of their religious origins: sand mandala, centering prayer, Sufi dancing, insight meditation, gathas, tonglen, metta, Shabbat, vision quest... (Still marked by particularity in the new tree: lectio divina, yoga, Aikido, Qigong, t'ai chi ch'uan.) Ceremonies and rituals based in a cultural or religious tradition has become a lower-hanging branch including only spiritual or cultural traditions.
The tree-image question stands: is religion the root, which eventually produces secular fruits? Or, as implied here, is religion a phase in a longer, basically secular story - roots and trunk are secular (communion, connection, awareness). Some branches might be religious, but leaves and fruit, now that the tree has grown some more, are secular again?
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Folds of history
Behold, one of the smaller Northern Wei Buddhas we weren't able to see inside the fabled Longmen caves. The sublime folds and serene smiles make this perhaps my favorite period in Buddhist art. I've admired it before, but saw it with new eyes at the Princeton Art Museum on Friday, having stood outside the UNESCO listed grottoes where it long lived (they don't let tourists in). One wonders at its journey here. It was
a gift of an alumnus, c. 1940-42, a time when the Japanese invasion turned China inside out and much art was spirited out in different ways and for different reasons - though it might have been prised from its perch already earlier in China's century of repudiation of its religious heritage. It might be smiling at the irony that a college in New Jersey spared it the fate of its defaced fellows during the Cultural Revolution.
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
More Than Meets Eye
We went to the university archives today with our New School histories class. Students will be studying the publicity scrapbooks which, in part with a grant we secured from the Provost's Office, have been digitized. I haven't been in the presence of the originals aura since then. Even disbound for scanning they're still thrilling. Lost myself in reviews of the 1947 Dramatic Workshop production of Jean-Paul Sartre's "Les Mouches."
(Dramatic Workshop scrapbook #4, part 2, page 7)
Monday, September 10, 2018
Sunday, September 09, 2018
Cloud of witnesses
We got a sense of why when Jeff (most of his later students referred to him as "Stout" but he was Jeff to us) gave some autobiographical remarks at the end of today’s talks. He was an activist in high school and college, and his experiences with the coalitions of religious and secular people in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s defined a trajectory studying and making explicit the sources of democratic moral engagement – sources not only overlooked by scholars both secular and religious but inconceivable to them. His most recent books Democracy and Tradition (2004) and Blessed are the Organized (2012) make the connection to democracy clearest. His earlier The Flight from Authority (1981) and Ethics after Babel (1989) were more concerned to challenge received ideas about the incommensurability of religion and modernity.
We arrived just after the publication of Ethics after Babel and couldn’t have predicted the direction his work would take after that. Jeff probably couldn’t have either. As he put it yesterday, as he was approaching forty he realized there was a whole world of texts which he needed to study to challenge mistaken narratives about a great separation of religion and politics, and about democracy as opposed to tradition. He was working intensely on them when we were his students, and encouraged us to read them, too. But Jeff was seeking, not yet finding, and didn’t have an explanation yet for why Edmund Burke and William Hazlitt and Harriet Martineau mattered, certainly not one we could understand. Wasn’t Burke one of the fathers of modern conservatism, the others justly forgotten? Now the story is clear – the early Burke inspired others in the tradition of democracy – but it wasn’t then. The three of us did our own things for our dissertations, a little hurt that he had little to say about them.
Noticing the caesura in the rhythm of Jeff's books - 1981, 1989, [ ,] 2004, 2012 - I’ve thought for a while that his intellectual career was like the movement of an inchworm. We had caught him at the moment when the worm had drawn its hind legs (?) up right next to its front legs in an omega-shape before shooting forward another full body length ... but who knew in what direction that would be, how it decided? Perhaps that image came to me because inchworms can seem a little tentative when they stretch out again, waving back and forth before somehow committing to a direction. With the advantage of hindsight I see that Jeff was not lost but seeking, truly open-endedly seeking – as all scholars claim to be but few truly are. And that he eventually found what he was looking for. It would have been nice to be there when it all came together!
Jeff Stout with Cornel West on Friday night
Jeff’s retirement from teaching doesn’t mean his seeking – and sharing his findings - has ended. He has his recently delivered Gifford Lectures to turn into a book (given the rhythm, I predict they'll appear in 2020!), among other things, and doubtless has much more up his sleeve. He still looks as young and energetic as he did when we worked with him. The passion of his loves burns as intense as ever. But his retirement does feel like the end of an era - the kind of talk that predictably goes on especially at retirement events like this but no less real for that. And if he’s retiring then we must not be students anymore! Perhaps the most confusing realization of this gathering was that he was quite a bit younger than we now are when we first met him! Where are we on our own trajectories as scholars, teachers and citizens? Have we found our way, remained true to our vocation, kept seeking? I’m certainly no stranger to the inchworm dance.
Hearing from those who were able to work more closely with Jeff than we were made some other things clear – things that were happening even if we didn’t appreciate them. I've long recognized that some of my pedagogical moves come from him. From him I learned a patience with opposing, especially conservative, views which strikes some true believers as misguided. It is also from him that I learned to believe in democracy as more than the worst system but for all the others – as, rather, our best hope for a genuinely human culture. But at this gathering it became clear to me that he wasn’t indifferent to our work after all. As grateful student after grateful student testified, he's not interested in making disciples, but in helping students find their true voices. Several said that, although they differed with Jeff on various things, he’d made it possible for them to become the best version of themselves.
Pedagogical kenosis: perhaps the signal was a bit muffled during that period of inwardness, but I can see it now, belatedly. Jeff practices what he preaches: a radical democratic ethics which takes every person you meet seriously not only as a fellow citizen but as an individual. Each of us is striving to live well, using norms and giving reasons and appealing to examples and paying tributes to sources in ways we hope others would recognize – and not just the others who are like us. We can recognize the power and beauty of others' norms, reasons, examples and sources of being without sharing them. Friendship is potentially as big as the moral community is wide. Our commitments can become more explicit in mutual recognition without converging into uniformity - and thank goodness for that. As Jeff put it with characteristic exactitude: “that's why I say the cloud of witnesses is essentially plural.”
Friday, September 07, 2018
Artful sight
Don't you find it's kind of impossible not sometimes to mistake things that happen in
art museums for themselves works of art - well, to see them with the eyes
with which you see art? John Cage would approve
the sentiment! (This explosion of Marian colors was at the Princeton Museum of Art, which I took the chance to pop into on my way
to a conference celebrating the retirement of my dissertation adviser.)
Thursday, September 06, 2018
Institution!
A joyous day! The new era which began with our new rector's arrival in June has now officially begun. It might seem odd that the "institution" (some have been calling it "installation") doesn't come right on a new rector's arrival, but it certainly worked today. The pomp and ceremony helped us see that the bond between the parish and the rector has already been forged. When the Bishop of New York said "greet your new rector" we applauded, applauded, applauded, everyone was beaming.
Wednesday, September 05, 2018
One and only?
My copy of the Muriel Spark Centennial edition of The Only Problem just arrived. The rather disappointing introduction by Richard Holloway (remember him?) rehearses the impossibiity of theodicy and wonders at the seriousness of Spark's religion:She believed in God, but it was a God in her own image. As a great novelist, she understood the impulse to tinker with her characters, much in the way God plays about with Job. (xiv)
I'm amused that the line from the book which I used to frame my Renmin course (you might have noticed it in the group photo with a big question mark over it) appears on the cover: It is the only problem. The problem of suffering is the only problem. It all boils down to that.
But is that really so? (Holloway thinks it so only for those who believe in God.) Part of what I learned from this teaching experience is that there are all sorts of unexamined assumptions in this claim: That suffering is one thing. That it - all of it - is a problem. That it's one problem. That it's the same problem. Here's another mistake I shouldn't have made, should have known better than to make! Did I not make a big deal, way back when, of rejecting "the problem of evil," replacing it with the intentionally ungainly but truer "problems of evil"?
Perhaps it's spending too much time with Job that's made me so forgetful. I suppose the Book of Job is the prooftext for those assumptions, the back story to the western monotheistic sense that everything else does boils down to that, that things tend to boil down to one problem. Perhaps I need to spend time with other figures! I don't have time for it today, but soon I'll mull what would happen if one's prooftext weren't the story of Job but, say, that of the Warring States period poet and archetypal "virtuous failure" Qu Yuan. Several folks in my Renmin class suggested such a comparison might be illuminating...
For real
J's and my New School history course this time round is a little smaller than we'd expected but actually a good size for our two-hour time frame. The students hail from across the university, which is quite exciting. The only funny thing is that what we'd conceived as a graduate class has now become an undergraduate seminar!
Today's class, the first one with assigned readings, revisited the founding ideals of the New School in the context of progressive ideas both a century ago and today. To keep the present on the table, we assigned an essay we've found helpful before, "What is college for?" by Gary Gutting in the New York Times' The Stone" column. It's from 2011 and today it proved dated in helpful ways.
The essay addresses discussion of the "value of a college education" that we've been hearing for several years now. The astronomical rise in tuition costs, and in student debt, have made this an ever more pressing issue, but Gutting is aiming higher. In a Pew survey, college graduates reported that college was "very useful in helping them grow intellectually," in "helping them grow and mature as a person," and in "helping prepare them for a job or career." But these arguments, skeptical as well as positive, all result from a basic misunderstanding of what colleges are for.
What are colleges for? Gutting argues that they nurture a world of ideas, and demonstrate that we regard intellectual culture as essential to our society. But professors as well as students have lost sight of this. Professors need to need to realize that dedication to their disciplines expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications. Students need to appreciate that a college education broadens you. Good teaching does not make a course's subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests - and so makes them more interesting.
Read in 2018 this seems a little quaint. A majority of Republicans has in the last two years been persuaded that colleges and universities are "bad for the country." Bastions of elite liberalism, they're regarded as making students not "more interesting" but more self-absorbed, at once relativist and intolerant. The "world of ideas" sounds either idly or subversively disengaged from the world. "Critical thinking," which we liberal educators purport to be teaching in all we do, is seen as nihilistic, morally and socially corrosive. (Actually it's not clear where the antipathy comes from; I'm stringing together views I've seen written about in various places.)
So what is college for? Happily we were reading this together with several documents from the time the New School was founded: an excerpt from John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916), the "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women" (1917 or, more likely, 1918) and Herbert Croly's celebration of the proposal in The New Republic, "A School of Social Research" (June 1918). None of them is interested in college. Dewey writes about education as lifelong, though his focus is on the education of children. The "Proposal" and Croly's essay argue the need for a school for adults. They're also all suspicious of otherworldly "world of ideas" talk, which displaces and degrades the active work of will and intelligence in life and endeavor.
What distinguishes these century-old proposals from most of our discussions today is their deep conviction that education is a social experience. (Croly giddily conflates social ideal, social process, social purpose, social life, social effort, social sympathies, social aspiration, social behavior, social knowledge, social relations, social activity, social impulse, social science, social practice, social experiment .... all of which flow together and through social research.) It should help students become the social beings they are meant to be, and in the process helps society as a whole become what it is meant to be. (The proposed new school would train and send out experts in bringing the social to the fore in all departments of life.)
Dewey argues that all thinking is research (D&E 174) - thinking understood as the work all of us do all the time in trying to solve problems, make things meaningful and build lives. (Correlatively not all research is thinking!) We think in and by doing. Schools aren't the only places thinking happens, but the places where thinking becomes reflective about itself, becomes habitually reflective. In the process we clarify our commitments, recognize and deepen relationships old and new, feel and hone our creative powers as interdependent social and moral beings in a world that is not settled and finished but rather is one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective (D&E 178).
Is that not what college is for, too?
Today's class, the first one with assigned readings, revisited the founding ideals of the New School in the context of progressive ideas both a century ago and today. To keep the present on the table, we assigned an essay we've found helpful before, "What is college for?" by Gary Gutting in the New York Times' The Stone" column. It's from 2011 and today it proved dated in helpful ways.
The essay addresses discussion of the "value of a college education" that we've been hearing for several years now. The astronomical rise in tuition costs, and in student debt, have made this an ever more pressing issue, but Gutting is aiming higher. In a Pew survey, college graduates reported that college was "very useful in helping them grow intellectually," in "helping them grow and mature as a person," and in "helping prepare them for a job or career." But these arguments, skeptical as well as positive, all result from a basic misunderstanding of what colleges are for.
What are colleges for? Gutting argues that they nurture a world of ideas, and demonstrate that we regard intellectual culture as essential to our society. But professors as well as students have lost sight of this. Professors need to need to realize that dedication to their disciplines expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications. Students need to appreciate that a college education broadens you. Good teaching does not make a course's subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests - and so makes them more interesting.
Read in 2018 this seems a little quaint. A majority of Republicans has in the last two years been persuaded that colleges and universities are "bad for the country." Bastions of elite liberalism, they're regarded as making students not "more interesting" but more self-absorbed, at once relativist and intolerant. The "world of ideas" sounds either idly or subversively disengaged from the world. "Critical thinking," which we liberal educators purport to be teaching in all we do, is seen as nihilistic, morally and socially corrosive. (Actually it's not clear where the antipathy comes from; I'm stringing together views I've seen written about in various places.)
So what is college for? Happily we were reading this together with several documents from the time the New School was founded: an excerpt from John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916), the "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women" (1917 or, more likely, 1918) and Herbert Croly's celebration of the proposal in The New Republic, "A School of Social Research" (June 1918). None of them is interested in college. Dewey writes about education as lifelong, though his focus is on the education of children. The "Proposal" and Croly's essay argue the need for a school for adults. They're also all suspicious of otherworldly "world of ideas" talk, which displaces and degrades the active work of will and intelligence in life and endeavor.
What distinguishes these century-old proposals from most of our discussions today is their deep conviction that education is a social experience. (Croly giddily conflates social ideal, social process, social purpose, social life, social effort, social sympathies, social aspiration, social behavior, social knowledge, social relations, social activity, social impulse, social science, social practice, social experiment .... all of which flow together and through social research.) It should help students become the social beings they are meant to be, and in the process helps society as a whole become what it is meant to be. (The proposed new school would train and send out experts in bringing the social to the fore in all departments of life.)
Dewey argues that all thinking is research (D&E 174) - thinking understood as the work all of us do all the time in trying to solve problems, make things meaningful and build lives. (Correlatively not all research is thinking!) We think in and by doing. Schools aren't the only places thinking happens, but the places where thinking becomes reflective about itself, becomes habitually reflective. In the process we clarify our commitments, recognize and deepen relationships old and new, feel and hone our creative powers as interdependent social and moral beings in a world that is not settled and finished but rather is one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective (D&E 178).
Is that not what college is for, too?
Monday, September 03, 2018
Typos
The good folks at the Pew Research Center have come up with a new typology of America religion. You can try their quick quiz here, but know that their questions are rooted in the expectation that most people are in, or from, a Christian background. (For all their faults, the Belief-o-Matic people are more in tune with a more pluralist and diverse America, if still imperfect.) I'll need to sit with it a bit - perhaps discuss it with some students! - to see what I think of it. Does it shine light in an interesting direction, and in a clarifying, helpful way? For the moment I'm sorting out how I feel about finding myself classed as stalwart.
Sunday, September 02, 2018
Saturday, September 01, 2018
Renminiscence
Before the new academic year, with its exciting collective projects and less inspiring committee obligations, kicks into gear, this might be a good moment to look back on my experience teaching at 中国人民大学 Renmin (People's) University of China in July and early August.
This was, as you know, my first real chance to teach in China. I gave a few talks in classes during my sabbatical year in China in 2014-15 (including one at Renmin), but these were few and far between, and of course one-offs. Designing a course for a community of students, interacting with them, watching them engaging, accommodating their particular needs and interests... how I missed that! So how exciting to have a chance to participate in the International Summer School at Renmin (aka Renda), a place I'd found congenial before - and in Beijing, to boot! (The summer part, well ... the price of admission.)
Most of the classes at Renda's summer school are in English and half the instructors hail from abroad. Renmin's was one of the first such programs in China; it celebrated its first decade this year. I was given a standing invitation to teach there in 2015 but was too busy in 2016 and missed the deadline for 2017. As described to me by its founder, it sounded like a nerdy international summer camp, a joyous interdisciplinary celebration liberated from majors and devoted to the joy of discovery. In the end I got to know a few of the other international faculty a little - at breakfast at the hotel many stayed at, and at a welcome reception - but that part of it didn't pan out. Most of the faculty were there for a more concentrated course than my leisurely four weeks, and/or to pursue other research or collaborations in China. I can see it functioning that way for me in the future, too.
The student body hails from across China and beyond, graduate as well as undergraduate, often in the same classes. All Renmin students have to take one English language summer school class during their studies. My thirty-one students were almost all early undergraduates from Renmin. (Also present two students from a Paris-Suzhou program, and an auditor from a Canadian university.) All were Chinese. By and large they were in majors for which Renmin is well known - social science and policy - although there was one philosophy major and the Canadian auditor was an English literature major. For the most part these were students of business, law, human relations management, finance, demography and statistics, journalism. Their facility with English varied but was generally at a high level. I was the more impressed since English - and for that matter western culture - was not a focus of their studies.
Folks in Beijing, and also here in New York, have asked me how Chinese students compare to American ones. I usually plead ignorance - my samples are so unrepresentative! A competitive national university lecture course vs. seminars in a self-selecting liberal arts college. In another way, my samples might be similarly unrepresentative: a foreign languages instructor who attended my classes and has become a friend proudly told me that, unlike the careerists of Tsinghua and the bitter intellectuals of Beijing University - the capital's other top schools - Renda's students earnestly "want to make the world a better place"!
My best answer to the question - tested out in China as well as here - is that when I threw out a question, nobody at Renda would raise their hand. (The Canadian told me that in Confucian culture it was frowned on to draw attention to yourself.) But when I called on a particular student, she would have an answer ready. So would the next, and the next, even the shyest - and in their second language, too! In my classes here, some students (often the same) raise their hands, and usually have something interesting to say. But many of the others are just following the discussion, not working answers out for themselves. Or, at least, would say so if I turned to them. (As a student I was like the latter, too... thinking things through, rarely the first to ask a question.)
It took me a little while to figure out how to hear from the students. I included brief writing assignments in class, where students provided interesting responses - but I didn't know which response was whose. Happily I'd also built smaller group discussions into the course (in part to break up our 3.5 hour sessions). The last half hour of class a group of six students would stay, and we'd talk about whatever they wanted to ask about. Some of these questions were about the material we'd have just finished working on, but others were more general, or on different topics entirely. (Even in these small groups I had to call on people - and each student had a question of their own.) By the time the final papers came in, I could put a face to a written voice, at least in many cases.
I haven't mentioned the elephant in the room - that my class was essentially a religion class dressed up as something else. "Interpreting the Literature of Suffering" was a version of "The Book of Job and the Arts," the title garnished to fit the secular framing of liberal arts at Renmin. When I asked students to introduce themselves in the second session, some said they'd come because they liked literature, and two said they wanted to learn better how to respond to suffering. Most were more vague - "it sounded interesting" - but a significant number also said they'd been curious to take a course on religion, or on the Bible. Some might have known that the institute which had invited me, while ensconced in the Chinese Philology Department, engages in pretty theological studies of "contemporary Christianity."
For my part, I didn't think I was teaching a religious studies course - let alone a Bible course. My class was about western responses to the problem of suffering, which were shaped but not dependent on religious templates. The Book of Job was like a springboard, a suitable focus for a concentrated course, but the subject matter it led us to was broader. Job, I told them, is compelling because it's proved valuable to people with such different faiths - and with none. It speaks to the collapse of any set of received notions about justice in the world. This is how I peddle it in the New School course, most of whose students are somewhere in the vicinity of "none." Perhaps that's why I thought this would translate to Renda better than my other courses. Secularizable, the problem of Job is surely universally accessible, right?
I'll have to devote another blogpost to just how naïve I was in thinking this - that is, to how this experience showed me my own lingering naïveté. I'm supposed to have discovered that the "problem of evil" doesn't really translate across cultures way, way back in graduate school, when I spent a year in Tokyo on a quest to find the Japanese theodicy, only to learn that the question wasn't posed, not in the way I expected at least. That discovery is supposed to have changed the whole way I approach the topic. In fact I start the New School course with an ancient poem I found in Japan that year, convinced it was a theodicy in disguise, while it's something else entirely...
Another blogpost, yes. I need to articulate what the Renda experience has taught me about the cultural contingency of the "problem of Job" - perhaps I can even turn it into an essay - but another time. Soon!
This was, as you know, my first real chance to teach in China. I gave a few talks in classes during my sabbatical year in China in 2014-15 (including one at Renmin), but these were few and far between, and of course one-offs. Designing a course for a community of students, interacting with them, watching them engaging, accommodating their particular needs and interests... how I missed that! So how exciting to have a chance to participate in the International Summer School at Renmin (aka Renda), a place I'd found congenial before - and in Beijing, to boot! (The summer part, well ... the price of admission.)
Most of the classes at Renda's summer school are in English and half the instructors hail from abroad. Renmin's was one of the first such programs in China; it celebrated its first decade this year. I was given a standing invitation to teach there in 2015 but was too busy in 2016 and missed the deadline for 2017. As described to me by its founder, it sounded like a nerdy international summer camp, a joyous interdisciplinary celebration liberated from majors and devoted to the joy of discovery. In the end I got to know a few of the other international faculty a little - at breakfast at the hotel many stayed at, and at a welcome reception - but that part of it didn't pan out. Most of the faculty were there for a more concentrated course than my leisurely four weeks, and/or to pursue other research or collaborations in China. I can see it functioning that way for me in the future, too.
The student body hails from across China and beyond, graduate as well as undergraduate, often in the same classes. All Renmin students have to take one English language summer school class during their studies. My thirty-one students were almost all early undergraduates from Renmin. (Also present two students from a Paris-Suzhou program, and an auditor from a Canadian university.) All were Chinese. By and large they were in majors for which Renmin is well known - social science and policy - although there was one philosophy major and the Canadian auditor was an English literature major. For the most part these were students of business, law, human relations management, finance, demography and statistics, journalism. Their facility with English varied but was generally at a high level. I was the more impressed since English - and for that matter western culture - was not a focus of their studies.
Folks in Beijing, and also here in New York, have asked me how Chinese students compare to American ones. I usually plead ignorance - my samples are so unrepresentative! A competitive national university lecture course vs. seminars in a self-selecting liberal arts college. In another way, my samples might be similarly unrepresentative: a foreign languages instructor who attended my classes and has become a friend proudly told me that, unlike the careerists of Tsinghua and the bitter intellectuals of Beijing University - the capital's other top schools - Renda's students earnestly "want to make the world a better place"!
My best answer to the question - tested out in China as well as here - is that when I threw out a question, nobody at Renda would raise their hand. (The Canadian told me that in Confucian culture it was frowned on to draw attention to yourself.) But when I called on a particular student, she would have an answer ready. So would the next, and the next, even the shyest - and in their second language, too! In my classes here, some students (often the same) raise their hands, and usually have something interesting to say. But many of the others are just following the discussion, not working answers out for themselves. Or, at least, would say so if I turned to them. (As a student I was like the latter, too... thinking things through, rarely the first to ask a question.)
It took me a little while to figure out how to hear from the students. I included brief writing assignments in class, where students provided interesting responses - but I didn't know which response was whose. Happily I'd also built smaller group discussions into the course (in part to break up our 3.5 hour sessions). The last half hour of class a group of six students would stay, and we'd talk about whatever they wanted to ask about. Some of these questions were about the material we'd have just finished working on, but others were more general, or on different topics entirely. (Even in these small groups I had to call on people - and each student had a question of their own.) By the time the final papers came in, I could put a face to a written voice, at least in many cases.
I haven't mentioned the elephant in the room - that my class was essentially a religion class dressed up as something else. "Interpreting the Literature of Suffering" was a version of "The Book of Job and the Arts," the title garnished to fit the secular framing of liberal arts at Renmin. When I asked students to introduce themselves in the second session, some said they'd come because they liked literature, and two said they wanted to learn better how to respond to suffering. Most were more vague - "it sounded interesting" - but a significant number also said they'd been curious to take a course on religion, or on the Bible. Some might have known that the institute which had invited me, while ensconced in the Chinese Philology Department, engages in pretty theological studies of "contemporary Christianity."
For my part, I didn't think I was teaching a religious studies course - let alone a Bible course. My class was about western responses to the problem of suffering, which were shaped but not dependent on religious templates. The Book of Job was like a springboard, a suitable focus for a concentrated course, but the subject matter it led us to was broader. Job, I told them, is compelling because it's proved valuable to people with such different faiths - and with none. It speaks to the collapse of any set of received notions about justice in the world. This is how I peddle it in the New School course, most of whose students are somewhere in the vicinity of "none." Perhaps that's why I thought this would translate to Renda better than my other courses. Secularizable, the problem of Job is surely universally accessible, right?
I'll have to devote another blogpost to just how naïve I was in thinking this - that is, to how this experience showed me my own lingering naïveté. I'm supposed to have discovered that the "problem of evil" doesn't really translate across cultures way, way back in graduate school, when I spent a year in Tokyo on a quest to find the Japanese theodicy, only to learn that the question wasn't posed, not in the way I expected at least. That discovery is supposed to have changed the whole way I approach the topic. In fact I start the New School course with an ancient poem I found in Japan that year, convinced it was a theodicy in disguise, while it's something else entirely...
Another blogpost, yes. I need to articulate what the Renda experience has taught me about the cultural contingency of the "problem of Job" - perhaps I can even turn it into an essay - but another time. Soon!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)