Govern this!

Not perhaps the best designed visuals for our Faculty Senate-run Governance Day, but it was good to see a significant turnout, and to remember together that higher education is practically unique in being a self-governed industry, at least in part. There is work to do!

Blueskying it

I was surprised this morning by the clear blue reflected in some of the buildings you can see looking down Sixth Avenue toward the financial district. 

This reminder of open horizons in unexpected directions was welcome on an otherwise pretty grim day. 

It wasn't just the November weather, and the daily litany of political lawlessness and economic distress. Some of the details of our university's urgent cost-saving measures became clear today, knock-on effects of enrollment shortfalls that will affect classes and programs and faculty appointments already this coming semester. And all this on top of the ongoing reorganization demanded by structural issues! Higher ed in America isn't well, and we aren't either. 

And then I went to an India China Institute panel discussion on "News Media in an Authoritarian Age," where speakers on India, China and the US described what seemed a shared playbook used by authoritarian regimes across all three countries threatening the freedom of the press and the livelihoods - and lives - of journalists. The moderator observed, ruefully, that when ICI was started two decades ago, one would not have expected the three countries to be on a continuum like this.

The only reflected blue was the India speaker's confidence (based on the aftermath of the press repression of the Emergency) that the "hunger for truth and debate" cannot be extinguished, and only grows in times of propaganda and censorship. Once this authoritarian phase is over, that hunger will call into existence vigorous new forms of investigation and dialogue. May it be so, and soon!

Exhibit A

In "Theorizing Religion" today, students had 20 minutes to design a non-ideological exhibition on world religions. We'd all been to see religion-related exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, and taken a virtual tour of the Museum of World Religions in Taiwan. We've also read critiques of the very category of "world religions." But it's easier to poke holes than to build up. If given the chance to design an exhibition of their own, how would they avoid these pitfalls? 

I suggested it would be good to agree on the kind of space to fill and someone suggested a circular hall, which I gave a single entrance.

Twenty minutes later we had three compelling and compellingly different exhibitions. One let viewers choose whether to start with "Practices" or "Death, Rebirth, Afterlife," or head straight toward "Divinity, Higher Powers," or intervening shows of texts and places of worship - each a medley of multiple traditions. In the middle of the room is an area for sitting and engaging the other senses, from scent to sound. Entirely optional pamphlets with analyses by scholars and theologians are available as viewers enter. The space has a dome-like ceiling across which various cosmic and celestial images play.

Another group imagined a constantly changing space, with semi-translucent screens hanging from the ceilings which viewers can move around at will. Each screen carries images of various elements of traditions and practices from around the world on both sides, photographs as well as artworks, some moving, which each viewer encounters in a different maze-like configuration. It is hoped that viewers feel free to rearrange images. Near the center of the space is a spiral staircase to a platform from which viewers can watch the constant dance of images and people below. The students also added new doors: the exhibit can be entered and exited from any side.

A final group went in the opposite direction. Visitors to "PATH" traverse a single tunnel-like trajectory, and see exactly the same things as every other visitor, in exactly the same sequence. On the way into this labyrinth, they see art works inspired by religious experiences, arrayed chronologically. No work is marked in terms of ethnicity, nationality or geography, but mixed among the works are descriptions of historic overlaps. At the labyrinth's center, viewers arrive at the present day, then wind their way out, this time encountering videos of contemporary phenomena. Images would again be hung from the ceiling, allowing viewers to see the feet of other visitors to the labyrinth. 

Which would you like to visit - or curate? 

Fenced off

Makes a cool picture, though... 

Autumnal apparitions

Native and interloper, at Blauvelt State Park, each a little otherworldly

Windfall

It's called "red maple" for the stems, not the leaves, dontcha know

Walled garden

 

Seen from above you almost don't notice the trees are now off limits

Sudden shower

There's a gorgeous arboreal cover on the newest New Yorker, Sergio Garcia Sánchez's Hiroshige-inspired "Sudden Shower." 

I love how the tree keeps growing upward and out of the frame on the right, too venerable to be concerned with symmetry. It must have been drawn from life!

The people still speak

Forbidden garden

We received word today that the Lang courtyard will be closed off for three to four months due to facade repairs and renovations. In the next days, barriers will block ground-level access, leaving only window views.

Canonize this!

For the Feast of All Saints, behold this glory, a new work of the queer Episcopalian illustrator Andrew Freshour, "Jesus Christ and the Saints."

In total, I painted fifty saints. It was quite the journey picking them all. I included saints from the Anglican/Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church, Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, and various Protestant reformers. I also added important Christian civil rights activists and martyrs, like MLK Jr, Jonathan Daniels, and Matthew Shepard.  

I think I've puzzled out another dozen. How many can you divine?

November!

Job seekers

Attended a presentation on trends and challenges in higher education today, from one of the sources of the materials which were keeping my Provost's Office colleague up at night. Nightmarish indeed was this slide on changes in work. My colleague had mentioned hearing the half-life of job skills keeps shortening part: most workers will need on the job retraining every five years. But the research indicates many workers will not be on the same job at all: Today's workers have not just 12-30 jobs over a lifetime, but multiple careers as well. Twelve to thirty?! Many sectors are included here, but still, wow.

I can't wrap my head around this. The implications for higher ed, the focus of the talk, are perhaps clearer: workers will be regularly needing retraining in and between jobs - a market for adult education, albeit focused on short shelf-life job skills. Us liberal arts types might be the only ones also to see an enhanced need for the "durable skills" of critical thinking, research, communication, ethical reflection, collaboration, etc., too. But what of the workers themselves?

Beyond the matter of commuting and health care, lodging and schools (no small matter any of them!), does this mean most workers will always be on the market, always looking for the next opportunity given the likelihood their current employment won't last? (Is this what young folks mean by learning to "brand yourself"?) How nerve-wracking, how exhausting, even for those who manage to stay ahead of the game, securing a satisfying next gig before the last one peters out. 

But I wonder also what this means existentially, spiritually, since meaningful work is central to a full life. In Theorizing Religion a few weeks ago we reviewed Marx's claim that the forms of personal spirituality emerging already in his time were the sign of a thorough alienation of laborers from their labor. 

Marx worried that work harnessed to the caprice of a commodity market decoupled from actual human need and meaning - manufacturers pay laborers to make whatever sells, workers take whatever jobs are avaiable - voided labor of its meaning to the laborer. A restless and unending calibration of your skills with an ever changing market seems like a more extreme form of this abstraction. 

What religious world would be the "reflex" here? (Reflex isn't a good thing: it's smoke showing there's a fire.) A restless accruing of ever more means to spiritual balance and control? An eclipsing of even a shred of meaning in one's human agency, seeking release instead in mystical, perhaps psychedelically mediated other worlds? The presentiment that this whole world is run by spiritual forces inimical to human values, who can be resisted only through a warfare of charismatic extremity? A quasi-religious exaltation of the apparently unchangeable realities of biological reproduction? A seeking of kinship in forms of life radically unlike the human, from the fungal to the digital to the, well, arboreal?

I think I might take advantage of the relationships with alums I've rekindled for "DIY Religion" to pick their brains about this... 

All souls

 Someone's kitted out the courtyard for Dia de los Muertos!

LREL S26

We do a lot with a little! 

Please invoke such powers as you know to ensure we get enough students to sign up for these great courses! In the current austerity, the threshold for cancellation is higher than it's been before, and non-major programs like ours need all the help we can get.

VOTE!

Palimpsest

I've been through the exhibition now with alums of various generations - one over zoom! - and all concur that it captures the spirit of the place: always changing (indeed, in crisis!) but also reassuringly the same. And each alum made at least a few delighted (re)discoveries! The team that put this together done good! This interactive multi-site narrative about the life of the liberal arts is "unbound" in all the right ways. Bravi us! 

Trunk line call

4 eyes: better than 2! Look at that tree in the river, I said as we crossed a stream on a visit to friends in central Pennsylvania, wondering how its carcass had been moved into the middle. But my companion thought I meant the other tree, which I had entirely missed, the new one!

Buzz

Did you know most native bees are not social but solitary? This is a "bee hotel" for them at the Penn State Arboretum's pollinator garden. Cool!

Gone

One of the most important ideas in Timothy Snyder's warnings about tyranny is "don't obey in advance."

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. 

I found a chilling example of this in today's Times. From this A Pile of Rubble headline you'd never guess that the president has trashed a wing of the people's house not only without permissions and precautions but without even admitting he was doing so. He said his vanity ballroom would leave the existing structure untouched. Oops. 

The formulation Critics are enraged (as critics always are) while Others say it was time for a change is what anticipatory obedience looks like. It frames a crime against history and tradition as fodder for "X was right about everything." 

But there's even more anticipatory caving to abuse of power in the ratification of his crime. Just a day ago his $300 million ballroom, for which no formal plans have been publicized, let alone reviewed or approved, was a "$250 million ballroom" and just last week it was a "$200 million ballroom." This Makeover will be a temple to bribery!

Full circle

My series of alumnae/i-led classes in the "DIY Religion" first year seminar came full circle today! 

Our speaker was an anthro-pologist who's just defended a fascinating dissertation on non-Turkish Muslim ummah in Istanbul. But fifteen years ago he was in a first year seminar here himself. It was called "Religion in Dialogue" - with yours truly! 

Launched

The exhibition is up! (Pics soon.) We kicked it off at a celebration of Eugene Lang College's 40th anniversary, which was attended by current staff, faculty and students, alums - and a dozen descendants of our namesake benefactor. The team which put together the exhibition was represented by our stellar undergraduate research assistant, above!

Liberal ats unbound

Tomorrow's the celebration of the 40th anniversary of my school, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts! 

The process of putting together a commem-orative exhibit at the same time the university as a whole contem-plates a restructuring has been, it must be said, a little surreal, though perhaps not that different from the New School's day-to-day! In any case, we're telling the big story of the liberal arts at The New School, which goes back twice as far and involves other programs and populations. We focus on the special freedom and responsibility of self-designed liberal arts education, the relationships formed both in seminars and in reaching across to other university communities... all of which allow us to imagine next chapters of many kinds!

I love this poster our director of communication designed after listening in on one of our conversations. She came up with the exhibition title "Unbound" too!

Redefining presidential

Whose streets? Our streets!

You won't see this in the newspapers - I looked in vain in my usual sources, particularly disappointed by the grey lady though I should know better - but those of us there know it happened. I don't want to wait another four months for the next one.

No Kings, Morningside Heights

 

 

We want justice,

 

We want peace! 

 

We want ICE 

 

Off our streets!

 

 

Morningside Heights was out in force for today's epic No Kings protest. Hand-made posters ranged from the cerebral to the visceral. 

 

No kings!

It's been a while, but it'll be good to stand for democracy tomorrow.

Tangents come round

Another chance to talk about New School history - what turned out to be the only faculty-led session at "family weekend." Scheduled in the very pleasant but very non-classroomy Faculty Lounge, I had to do without visuals but this turned out fine. The organizers promised an experience of a New School class, so I put the good people who showed up to work in groups interpreting and then updating the 1918 "Proposal for a New School of Social Science for Men and Women." Thinking of the who, what, where, when, why and how of the "Proposal" gave us a template for thinking of the future New School: Who, what, where, why, how is demanded today? (Between those assignments we had a crash-course in how The New School came to look so completely different from what its planners envisioned, and why that frees us to think boldly about how its future might need to be different again.) 

 

We didn't have heaps of time - five minutes in groups, and five minutes to hear from all the groups (!) - but it was enough to get some rich suggestions for creating an accessible, diverse and idealistic space that nonetheless prepares students for a non-ideal world riven by misogyny, racism and xenophobia... This is unpretty 2025, after all.

 

At the end, it being 2025, I also thought it only fair to bring in what I'd advertised on my schedule as a "surprise guest" - Claude, my AI of choice. Given the same prompt I'd given them, it came up with an impressive list of reasons for new thinking (including "AI disruption"!):  

You need to know that this is how the writing of most college essays starts these days, I quipped, exaggerating perhaps less than I thought I was. There's nothing wrong with using the best tools available to you, I added, but even our short time together today showed what AI can't give you: the reality that human meanings are many, and that we learn best and think most creatively when engaging with diverse others. The small group pedagogy which has always characterized The New School is perhaps even more urgently necessary today. A little pat, but what the occasion demanded!

 

Chatting afterward with some parents, including the parents of one of my students (who was there too), I found myself building a whole pedagogy out of going on tangents - something AI can't give you but something our students do very well indeed. I always start with Dewey's idea that we only really absorb new knowledge if we can connect it to knowledge and concerns we already have, but today it seemed that it's precisely in tangents that we see that connecting happening. 

 

And it's not just about how individuals learn. The magic of a seminar or discussion-based curriculum is that you get to see other people making connections with the same new knowledge you're grappling with, which might lead you to course-correct your tangents, and will also surely set you off on new tangents together. AI definitely can't do that! 

 

The only thing better than this social dance of tangents would be if you could do it in a structured way and more than once, engaging other new things together - perhaps once or twice weekly for a semester? What a community this would be - and of course the more accessible and inclusive the better. Would it prepare students for success in a frightened and suspicious world reeling from algorithmically charged atavisms? It shows there are alternatives...

Best kept secret

Funny story, sorta. The self-design Liberal Arts major which I direct is introducing its first dedicated course, modeled on something in the far larger Bachelors Program for Adult and Transfer Students self-design program with which we currently merging. Deans have long hoped more of our students would choose this path, but many apparently don't even know it exists! So we had a talented student designer come up with this poster for us. ("Best kept secret" was my idea.) Student workers are the best! Except when they're not. The student charged with reproducing and posting them claims to have put them up but there are none to be seen. The secret remains secret.

Stackable

These last two weeks I've been watching with mounting excitement as cardboard and wood "stackable seats" are assembled near our dean's office. These ingeniously versatile structures will form the skeleton of the Lang 40th exhibition, "Unbound: Liberal Arts at The New School."

Triumph of western barbarity

The indispensable Heather Cox Richardson draws our attention to the language of the recent presidential proclamation reclaiming "Columbus Day" from the haters. I'm struck by the Christian nationalist story which the writer of the proclamation (surely not the prez) is setting up. Some excerpts:

Today our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus — the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth. This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory. ... 

He was guided by a noble mission: to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain, and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands. ... 

Upon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith. Though he initially believed he had arrived in Asia, his discovery opened the vast frontier and untold splendors of the New World to Europe. He later ventured onward to Cuba and other islands in the Caribbean — exploring their coasts and engaging with their people.... 

Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve, Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.

Jesus Christ and Western civilization, virtue and steadfast prayer, "thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason and culture" and "America's proud birthright of faith" - all of them culminating in the Declaration of Independence, "the ultimate triumph of Western civilization," oh my! This is a submarine sandwich of white nationalist tropes, tropes long associated with the figure of Columbus. 

Richardson draws attention to how explicitly Christian it is. But haven't I said I think the storyline for 1776-2026 is going to be the less overtly Christian "faith, family, freedom"? That's in the proclamation, too, in its nod to the Italian Americans who created Columbus Day. (There's no mention of the civilizations of the Indigenous People of Turtle Island smothered by the Christian "birthright.")

To this day, the United States and Italy share a special bond rooted in the timeless values of faith, family, and freedom. 

How do you think Giorgia Meloni understands the three f's? I won't nauseate you with more of this tripe; there is doubtless lots more of it to come. (This bombast will surely characterize the captions of the promised National Garden of American Heroes for which the NEH was eviscerated.) But I have to rub my eyes at the realization that the folks behind this belligerent chauvinism believe themselves to be the ultimate fruit of Western civilization! 

Where's Sylvia Wynter when you need her?

Feel the love

At a time when hatred and fear are being celebrated in the highest places, and cities are vilified as particularly hellish, it was a wonderful balm to explore the exhibition "Dear New York," in Grand Central Station. The work of Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind Humans of New York, this exhibition replaces all the station's advertisements for two weeks with portraits and interview snippets. Most news images of the exhibition show the iconic central hall of Grand Central, but it's actually the least changed (except for being advert-free, I suppose). 

Images from Stanton's work snake along the corridors connecting the three levels of subways beneath the station, mixing with the people making their way to and from trains. Taking pictures of my own I was initially torn between waiting for people to pass so I'd get an uninterrupted view of Stanton's exhibition, and trying to stage the people hurrying obliviously by with it. Looking at my pictures now, the most satisfying are those in which you feel that the folks in his photos and in mine are the same, all New Yorkers with stories you may never know, but which work like Stanton's assures you are worth the knowing.

 

In Vanderbilt Hall, there's new work from other photographers - profiles of the work of ten local neighborhood photographers (one focusing on the homes of the formerly incarcerated), and surrounding them on three sides, portraits by New York schoolchildren describing people "who have had an impact" on their lives. Lots of cleverly posed mothers and fathers and siblings and friends, grandparents, teachers, priests, neighbors... 

 

It's impossible not to feel buoyed by all the love surfaced and celebrated here. (The interactions of people viewing the exhibition were unusually kind and tender, too. I think many of us had tears in our eyes.) I think something like Humans of New York could be done anywhere ... and probably should!