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?

Reaching out

From such simple beginnings it's getting quite involved

Opening salvo

In the first meeting of our intensive mini-course "What is college for? Higher education in society" we started with the familiar 1918 "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women," allowing students to annotate it with questions and observations, and then zoomed out dramatically to suggest a much bigger set of questions. Groups of students were charged with reading and presenting four additional texts, each interesting in its own right but also, we promised shining light from a different angle on the problems The New School sought to address.

The first group gave a quick survey of the history of universities, a longer and more complex history than most realize. Why, where and how institutions of higher instruction and learning were established raised questions about whose the university is and whom it is accountable to. Founders, sponsors, the public, government, knowledge itself?

A second group talked about the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, raising questions of access and exclusion - and drawing attention the heroic efforts of those excluded in designing and defending their own institutions of higher learning.

A third group told about the founding of the American Association of University Professors, just a few years before - and involving many of the same thinkers as - The New School, making clear how rare it is for educators to run the show, or even to have stable positions. (The issues raised by each group resonate not only with New School woes but with growing attacks on higher education nationally and internationally.)

The final group used material from a video on the "founding mothers" of The New School (ten of the nineteen members of the 1918 Organization Committee) to help make us aware of the exclusion of women from nearly the whole history of universities, and of how the New School's legacies include the tenacity and imagination of thinkers anchored in practices and institutions besides the university.

It's a lot to process and we have only two more sessions to process it, but it was exciting to find that the compressed format actually gave us permission to think more broadly. I'm not sure I've ever approached our local and global issues with quite this wide a frame. Perhaps this was possible also because the current New School seems more unmoored from its past than ever, even as the idea of it invites all involved in it to think beyond about crucial questions of higher education's role and function in society. A good start!

Yogic

Visiting one of the discussion sections for "After Religion" today, I was asked to say a few words about "where yoga comes from." Students had done our reading on how criticisms of the inauthenticity of contemporary yoga practices fall prey to the same essentializing moves which drive the market for neoliberal spirituality commodities. Everyone's looking for the true pure authentic original yoga, but historians of religion know no tradition is true or pure in this way, and that claims for purity and authenticity do violence to the richness and complexity of living traditions. "[I]t is not the scholar’s place to establish or verify claims about origins or authenticity," she proposed, directing us instead

to acknowledge those claims among spiritual subjects, to analyze them as religious claims, and, in the study of religion in contemporary society, to critique their relationship to the economic and social machinations of the dominant culture of consumer capitalism. (Jain, Peace Love Yoga, 64-5)

Well and good, students said. But surely the point wasn't that anything could with equal legitimacy claim to be yoga. Surely different contemporary practices and products are some of them guiltier than others of traducing an ancient tradtion! And if we don't want to let Narendra Modi claim yoga for an ahistorical and politically reactionary Hindutva, isn't he still closer to it than the fitness industrial complex? The class wanted to know: how did yoga start?

I think I found a way to preempt a default to the fallacy of origins. When Patañjali penned the Yoga Sutras, I said - nobody's sure when that was, by the way - he wasn't creating something new but rather recording practices which had proved themselves over centuries before. (Similar sorts of practices proved and would prove themselves to Buddhists, Jains, Daoists, and Islamic and Christian mystics.) He organized them into eight categories, only two of which are the postures and breathing exercised we think of as "yoga." Indeed, these two were means not ends, and means not to helping people be their fullest self in the here and now but to leaving their bodies and their very humanity behind. 

When word of yoga was brought to these shores by Swami Vivekananda in 1893 (I passed around my book from the Congress of the World's Religions, describing its importance as the first time Asian figures spoke for their traditions in the West), it was as philosophy, not physical practice. Indeed a philosophy he claimed was consonant with the monotheistic religions... Is that what you were after, I asked?

BNSBNR

In "After Religion" today we spent ten minutes brainstorming the difference between religion and spirituality but it was of course a trick question. After exploring the ways in which the SBNR and some who lament the decline of religion seem to agree about the difference, I reminded the class of one of the claims in our reading: 

What is often called spirituality is yet another form that religion assumes under certain historical, social, political, cultural, and economic conditions. (Andrea Jain, Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality, 50)

One could quarrel with the argument but the artificial clarity of the religion/spirituality contrast faded quickly, coming to seem more like a polarity within religion than something fundamentally different from it. Maybe we were moving too quickly? A student's reflection helped me appreciate why the religion/spirituality distinction might not mean as much as it used to. "Our parents are Gen X," the student said; "they're all about being spiritual but not religious, but we..."

So maybe at least some of them are "after religion" in the sense of seeking it even in the aftermath of its purported demise. Jain's claim, a cold shower for someone thinking they had left religion behind, might even be comforting to children of the Gen X...!

Left leaves

In my office, memories of last semester's interrupted class...

What is college for?

My second class for the semester starts Friday. The latest fruit of my longstanding collaboration with my friend and New School history colleague J, it's something old and something new. 

With New School history, though, old and new can be hard to distinguish. This will be in a format new to us - a 1-credit intensive mini-course taught over three weekly 3-hour sessions online - but we've been trying out new formats from the start: lectures and seminars, online journals and e-books, exhibitions and podcasts. And if the subject matter - New School in the context of higher education - isn't that new, it has a new urgency at this moment of existential crisis for the university ("tumultuous and anxious times," the university ombuds says), worlds apart from the valedictory warmth of the short-lived interest around the centennial three years ago. 

We didn't actually plan to teach in this format: a standard issue seminar was the original plan, though of course team-taught. But registration for spring classes ended before last semester's strike and soul-searching, and not enough people signed up! Undaunted we proposed replacing the original course with two linked but independent intensives, each in a slighty different format. Both are called "What Is College For?" and will offer 1 credit for 10 contact hours. "Higher Education in Society" meets online over three Friday mornings. Its complement, "Making a Liberal Arts Major," will meet in person three mornings in a row over a weekend next month. Small-scale intensives like these exist in other parts of the university; we're game to experiment with their efficacy in a liberal arts context.

Thinking outside the box is of course a very New School thing to do.

Sconce

When it appeared last week, this manifestation of a water leak under the paint on a wall of our Church of the Holy Apostles struck many of us as weirdly beautiful - a work of art! A week later it's grown...

and brought friends...

Brrrr

Once-in-a-generation cold, though NYC's real feel low was only -28˚C.

躺平

The new entrance to the Long Island Railroad concourse at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue has a map it took me a while to recognize. (To be fair, I first saw it from below, and took the escalator up and back down to get a fuller view.) The horizontal Manhattan is kinda cool.

Flurry

Yesterday morning there were some flurries, which I raced to take a picture of (indeed a gif!). It's been a snowless winter in New York City, and I knew it wouldn't last on the ground. 

But looking out the window this morning - behold! Mostly melted away by afternoon, but still, the most snow yet!