Spring flames

Light show

Yesterday morning, as I was getting ready for a zoom meeting from my office, I noticed the color of the trees rippling, so I shot a quick video. Later I realized I didn't know what was going on - and still don't. At the time I thought that the wind was pushing the trees toward me and into shadow, but on closer inspection that's not what was happening. Now I'm guessing that the shadow was coming from something else, perhaps the steam from a chimney (it was quite cold)? A friend I sent it to asked if the trees were blooming and I sent them this. Splendor!

ChatGPT, my learning buddy

When I ran the first year program some time ago, I was introduced to the "harm reduction" approach to issues of substance abuse. Students would use legal and illicit drugs whether we told them to or not, but would surely not listen to us if we simply told them it was wrong. A public health approach distinguished itself from a legal one, encouraging them to understand what they were risking, to think about using in safely and more responsible ways, minimizing the likelihood of harm to themselves and others. This approach could not only earn a hearing, but might convince them to reduce or even stop.

Something like a harm reduction appraoch is evidently being taken by our university in response to the arrival of AI programs like ChatGPT. Students will make use of it whether we tell them to or not, the thinking seems to go, but maybe we can get them to use in a more thoughtful way - which might even lead them to realize that they're better off not partaking. This, which went out to faculty from the provost's office today, seems a little too accommodating, though.

How might student learning be supported by the use of generative-AI? It took me a while to make the gestalt switch to recognizing the wisdom of harm reduction; this may take me some time too.

Decoupled

I learned today that I won't be "broadening views" and "touching the future" at the International Summer School in Beijing this year. 可惜！The liberal arts school endorsed the same three instructors as in recent years, when all of us taught, but this time only one of our courses was accepted by the summer school organizers. Things happen for the opaquest of reasons over there, but it's hard not to wonder if our two courses were turned down because they deal mainly with western materials. Chinese universities have been enjoined to decouple themselves from western learning, and the ISS claims to be drawing an international faculty of experts teaching about China. 

Still, no reason was given. My past experiences have involved unexplained decisions which only made sense in retrospect - no first year students one year (because, it emerged, they were needed for a patriotic parade), double sized classes the next (to absorb the last year's students). Perhaps we'll learn that this year's decisions are also based on some unrelated factor. My sponsor says we should apply again next year.

To be honest, I was concerned that this year's summer school might not allow a virtual option. I was invted to confirm my interest in returning just a week before the government's abrupt about-face on covid, and the expectation at that point was that things might stay virtual for years. I was prepared to ask to defer if teaching required being there in person, given the continuing difficulty and considerable expense of travel now. But I might have found a way to go anyway. One reason I value this opportunity is because the picture one gets of China from here has long been so one-sidedly grim, and only getting darker; spending time there was a way to get a more balanced view, or at least a more complicated one. 

Colleagues I met at the international summer school the first time I went said one of the best things were the unscripted conversations with students between and outside classes, and that proved to be true. I missed out on those during our years of virtual instruction; the classes all happened on a Chinese zoom-analog called voov and were all of course recorded. But meeting students in small groups still allowed us to engage each other as human beings, full of curiosity and care. Laughing together was especially sweet. 

It's been over three years since I was last in China, three years in which so much has happened domestically and internationally. This may not be a "cold war" but it's getting chilly. Humanizing unscripted conversations are more important than ever, but rarer and rarer.

Little to no accumulation

Okay, so maybe it wasn't an entirely snowless winter here in NYC...

Educated non-experts

We wrapped up our second intensive mini-course today. We've meet three mornings in a row (the original plan was to be in person for all three, but it turned out the building we'd been given a room in is closed Sundays, so today's meeting was on zoom), welcomed some inspiring visitors, and read three interesting pieces from New School history. The first session, devoted to the question "What are the liberal arts?" welcomed the dean of my college for a conversation about the nature of the liberal arts and included the school's stab at general education goals, called "Shared capacities." The second session, "Mapping liberal arts majors," looked mainly at other schools' programs, but we also read a new vision for the fine arts major at Parsons, and welcomed two of the students (both joint liberal arts-fine arts students) who wrote it to a discussion of student culture.

Most of today, "Designing a liberal arts major for The New School," was spent synthesizing students' occasionally surprising ideas for what should go into a liberal arts education, but we kicked it off with one final piece of New Schooliana, a summary of the 1983 report of a high caliber commission called to advise The New School on whether and how to set up a liberal arts college. The report (known at the time as the Heilbroner Report after its chair, economist Robert Heilbroner) often sounds very current but its most radical idea continues to be a revelatory bridge too far: instead of having students progressively specialize over four years, the Commission's proposal imagined students starting and ending with interdisciplinary seminars. Specialization happened during the middle two years. 

This hourglass shaped-curriculum (the climax of the history of undergraduate liberal arts experiments at The New School I wrote a few years ago) proved too hard to implement, especially given that many students don't spend a full four years here, but it's an exciting way of making liberal arts more than a background or a foundation for disciplinary learning. It's different also from the programs we'd learned about which devote the final year to an internships, independent or community projects. Certainly starting to apply what you've learned in the the "real world" is valuable (I'm reminded of Naropa's inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale model). But this supplements that with a return to the community of learning.

The "perspective and obligations of the educated non-expert" are that of the liberal arts in a profound way. (We noted the dangerous contrary, "uneducated experts.") Students still should become "intellectual[ly] self-sufficient" but this includes knowing the limits of your expertise, and how to find and work with those who know what you don't. These imagined senior seminars are models of a "complex, rapidly changing and free society" sustained by habits of humility and collaboration, anchored in communities of lifelong learning. Nice!

Beyond the fact that this proved logistically too challenging for The New School of the 1980s, these ideals were at best rhetorical for our students, half of them from non-liberal arts parts of the university and many near or at the end of their studies. But as a dynamic way of thinking about the relationship of disciplinary expertise and liberal learning, I hope the Heilbroner Report offered some useful takeaways. In a tiny way, our mini-course was a taste of what such a senior seminar for educated non-experts would be like.

Spring awakening

Vista

Inadvertent art - the Palisades on a rainy late March day

Stitched up

So "Faith - Fashion: Rituals and Conversations" was a blast! I had to miss the first sessions, since they overlapped with the first session of our intensive mini-course. But I witnessed enough during the second half of it to be able without pretense to write the below when we were invited, in closing, to jot down on the pieces of muslin before us what had been the most significant insight of the event for us.

Muslin pieces had been placed at each seat at the tables, each with a needle threaded with red thread; the event began with people's sewing a red thread on their neighbor's clothing. (The organizer filled me in, and sewed me a thread, when I arrived dueing the lunch break.) But as we were writing our thoughts down I noticed that many folks were using their needles and thread - unsurprising, given that most were from the world of fashion - and decided to follow suit. I felt quite Magrittean using a thread to play the part of a needle.

What I jotted down was inspired by the observations of the last contributor to the final discussion, "Challenges and opportunities," whose panel I had kicked off, though the last words - barely legible but they mean to say "like living in bodies with others human and more than human" - are mine, efforts to capture a rather arcane philosophical discussion about the opacity of the body and questions about whether clothing obscures or admits that unknowing, along with my friend O's opening observation that fashion, often thought of as narcissistic, is really an effort to overcome our loneliness.

Academic liberties

The second leg of "What is college for?" kicks off tomorrow, its focus "Making a liberal arts major." (Th first was "Higher education in society.") We'll be asking students to design a liberal arts BA, depending on where they are either for themselves or more conceptually for other New School students. We'll be moving from the aims of a liberal arts education (tomorrow) to the best practices of reknowned programs (Saturday) to working out an actual curriculum one might live out at The New School (Sunday), with visits from Lang's dean the first day, and some students who've imagined a visionary restructring of our fine arts major.

The Lang dean suggested we start with a classic essay about the goals of a liberal arts education, historian William Cronon's 1998 "Only Connect." (These are general goals for students whatever their major.) This is indeed very inspiring, defining liberal arts beyond politically frought words like liberty and liberalism as about "freedom and growth." The aspiration is to produce people with an admirable set of qualities:

1. They listen and they hear.

2. They read and they understand.

3. They can talk with anyone.

4. They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly.

5. They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.

6. They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth.

7. They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism.

8. They understand how to get things done in the world.

9. They nurture and empower the people around them.

10. They follow E. M. Forster’s injunction from Howards End: “Only connect...”

(I wish I were better on 3 and 8, among others!) I look forward to students' responses to these ideals, and to what happens when we ask them to compare them to The New School's own boutique set of aspirations, the eleven "Shared Capacities." (The first five and last are sort of mandated by our accrediting body; the rest are our own. Each has its own learning outcomes.)

Critical Analysis 

Communication 

Quantitative Reasoning 

Research Literacy 

Scientific Literacy 

Authorship 

Creative Making 

Cross-Disciplinary Thinking 

Flexibility and Resiliency 

Working in Complex Systems 

Ethical Reasoning

It'll be interesting to toggle between the broader aims for all students across majors (New School's are conceived as relevant for libeal arts, design and performing arts students), and the particular ideals of a libeal arts major. Does it just do the general aims more fully and intentionally, or are there additional goals? I wonder if anyone will wonder at the absence of any canonical knowledge, great books?

In the back of my mind is something I may or may not have occasion to bring into the conversations. One of the most celebrated liberal arts colleges in the country, New College of Florida (one of those we'll be looking at Saturday), is in the midst of a hostile takeover. Florida Republicans, led by Governor DeSantis, plan to turn a legendarily progressive place into another kind of liberal arts college, one rooted in an artes liberales tradition understood to be specifically and uniquely western - and Christian. The model is Hillsdale College in rural Michigan, which has its own understanding of the value, and rigors, of an education for freedom and growth: 

Human beings have to be taught to see the world. ... 

A liberal arts education liberates us from our wishful thinking—and all the other constraints on our understanding of reality. It is the surest way to direct individuals toward a life that is truly free. 

Are we aiming for the same things? Hillsdale thinks you can't do it without the great ideas of the western tradition, an explicit commitment to developing the virtues, the full gamut of disciplines (including the natural sciences) - and the idea of perfection: God.

Image: Sandro Botticelli, "A young man introduced

to the seven liberal arts" (1483-6), Prudentia presiding

Bundles of joy

Fashionable

Never a dull moment at The New School! On Friday I'll be starting up the second mini-course on "What is College For?" with my friend J in the morning, then running to this event, the brainchild of a colleague in the fashion program at Parsons. While it's designed to be open-ended, it's clear that it will be quite different from the "Religion-Fashion Seminar" my friend O and I led in (can it be that long ago?) 2012, whose iconoclastic vibe was articulated in the zine we produced. Where we were fashion studies and religious studies people, this event will focus on fashion designers of faith and religious specialists interested in fashion - insiders to our relative outsiders, believers to our skeptics. I'm sure we'll all learn a lot!

Arboreal dignity

Gotta love a book that starts like this:

Trees are plants that people call trees - a term of dignity, not botany. Personification is intrinsic to treeness. A tree is a radically nonhuman thing, a modular organism, that humans exalt through misunder-standing as a person-like being: an individual with torso and limbs. 

That's from Jared Farmer's Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (Basic Books, 2022), 3. The clearly nonhuman tree (all these torsos and limbs come from one root) is in Viveiro de Coyoacán.

Mixico

Surely not just because I like trees, this large work of clay sculpture, from the second floor of the National Museum of Anthropology, has stayed with me as I reflect on our trip to Mexico. It's a work by Miguel Ángel Gutiérrez called "El Arbol" from Metepec, representing the "ethnic diversity and cultural wealth" of contemporary Mexico. On its base are words from a famous 18th century painting about mestizaje. 

En la América nacen gentes diversas

en color, costumbres, genios, y lenguas. 

Leyenda del quadro I de la Serie de Castas, José Joaquin Magón

It's quite wonderful to lose yourself as you find one unexpected thing after another in it - a basketmaker, temples, a car race, protesters, butterflies, musicians, a feast - all while a Rivera-like crowd of figures of all colors looks down at you from atop the maize-cross tree. The NMA's second floor is dedicated to living indigenous cultures; we found this on a quick peek at a few of its rooms. More reason to return!

Daffys

Meanwhile in Riverside Park, sure signs of spring!

Hasta la vista

And back home, after a fantastic first trip to Mexico City, Juan O'Gorman's 1937 "La Conquista del Aire por el Hombre" reminding us to come back son. The bougainvillea and jacarandas of Coyoacán, where we stayed in a rather darling Airbnb, bid us hasta la vista too.

Exempla

For our last day we explored San Angel, starting at the studios Juan O'Gorman designed for Diego Rivera (whose collection of carnival puppets regaled us), Frido Kahlo and himself - from the last

of which we saw a group endeavoring self-portraits inspired by Diego & Frida. In the nearby Museo de El Carmen we filled in the missing Spanish Catholic part of our sampler of Mexican history, accompanied by a whole crowd of 17th and 18th century Teresas in ecstasy. Supernatural energies flow!

Tlalocan

Wonders of Teotuhuacan - or whatever it was called by the people who lived there for most of a millennium before vanishing… they won’t have called this mural the Paradise of Tlalok (Tlalokan), as the Nahuatl-speakers who showed up hundreds of years later, either. But one can imagine the delight of those earlier discoverers!

 

Muralismo

We couldn't see the huge Diego Rivera mural at the Palacio Nacional (closed off because of student protests) so we found solace

in the murals in the Mercado Adalberto L. Rodriguez, which I learned of in the Whitney's recent "Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists 

Remake American Art, 1925-1945" show. Not all was visible but it was fun to discover this work by many artists in a thriving market

Decolonial

I decided to try traveling without my laptop. Posting from my phone is a little harder but still possible. Here’s me delirious in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, discovering that the Aztecs were the latest and hardly most interesting of Mesoamericans.

Viajamos!

Coming

CDMX calling

Spring Break! Come Sunday we're going somewhere new...

Religion in visual metaphor

In "After Religion" today we had visitors - the creators of a most unusual new book called A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor. Mona Oraby and Emilie Flamme met at a liberal arts college, a professor writer and an undergraduate student designer, which seemed to me a perfect match with my class and context teaching a ULEC at the design-heavy New School. 

The story of the book is involved and serendip-itous. Perhaps the most important fact is that it grew out of an online project that most decidedly was not ever supposed to take book form, that was, indeed, conceived as outreach to digital native Gen Z college students more receptive to websites and Spotify playlists than to scholarly disquisitions. 

This website, also called A Universe of Terms, was a project of The Immanent Frame, a religion/ secularism themed site of the Social Sciences Research Council. Immanent Frame authors were polled for key terms in contemporary debates. 14 were selected and three brief accessible essays commissioned for each (to show multiple approaches), with yes, a Spotify playlist, too.

But the website also needed a visual identity, and for this the student designer devised a lexicon of images - Matisse cut-out-inspired stars, leaves, hands, dolls, circles, squares... I remember noticing them on the website and finding them deeply compelling. 

The story continued once the online Universe of Terms was released, over 2019-2020, and the world changed with covid and the murder of George Floyd. As classes were abruptly shifted online, Oraby and Flamme found themselves discussing what scholarship for this frightening new reality would look like, who were scholars, and whom scholars were accountable to. 

And somehow the idea emerged to design a book from the website, a book more like a graphic novel than an academic volume. Eight of the website's fourteen terms were chosen, and short resonant passages were chosen from the essays which had been written about them to inspire new illustrations. The sources of the quotations are given in endnotes.

The resulting book is gorgeous but also a little confounding. The images dance from page to page (another of Flamme's inspirations is Calder's mobiles), only occasionally making space for blocks or lines of text. A bookish colleague of mine found it upsetting. But designers I showed it to loved it. One, whom I hadn't told the backstory, wondered if the text was necessary at all!

I'm not sure what I think (the uniformity of the images seems in tension with the polyphonic aspirations of the original project, for instance), but I'm intrigued enough by it that I want to build the Universe of Terms - book and website - into "Theorizing Religion," which I teach again next semester. 

From today's class discussion I'm fascinated by the possibility of representing concepts in this visual way. Not just illustrating them, as though thought must always default to words! In some way this book of imagery is not just supported by all the scholarly work behind it but rises above it. Some things are lost, certainly (though it tells you how to find them); aren't others gained? 

I look forward, for instance, to working from these panels back to the essay from which the text is taken. The ideas, from Sylvia Wynter, are dense and difficult; do the images simplify, clarify, amplify?

Budding

Meanwhile... 

Trilling

I thought our Adirondack snow peeping was complete but the snow had other ideas. With sun-warmed air after just-freezing days without wind, the lines of powdery snow along horizontal branches expanded 

and distended, looking for all the world like snakes in the trees. It's a loopy droopy wonderment, pretty rare, and apparently known as a snow garland. To me they seem like soundless songs of joy and praise.