Snowed

First real snowfall of the winter. So beautif--- It's hard to delight in it as my friends and colleagues anguish over the impossible decision, due tomorrow, whether to pursue "voluntary" departure from the school.

Visibilize-ing Care

As part of the Visibilize-ing Care Festival in the spring, I'll be doing something to mark the restoration of our relationships with the Lang Courtyard trees, once human access to them is restored. But today visibilized other efforts at care, and needs for more. 

The university leadership met online with the faculty of our college, answering various precirculated questions about the impending "voluntary" and likely subsequent "involuntary" departures of faculty and staff, and their effect on curriculum and student enrollment and retention. We didn't learn much. The administration isn't looking for new ideas. They think they've set in motion necessary and humane processes for reducing the workforce of the university in the face of enrollment decline. (The goal seems to be 10-15% of FTEs, however that falls out.) They emphasized that the "voluntary" stage was a way of showing respect and care for the community, maximizing "choice" and even generating new "opportunities," words that went down like lead. 

After they left the zoom room for another meeting, we faculty had some time to debrief. What are the options facing those deemed "eligible" for "voluntary" departure, how spooked are students by imminent changes and how spooked should they be, have we any leverage? It took some time for the spell cast by their budgetary logic to be broken. We're talking not just about people's careers but their livelihoods - families and health care - our lives. There must be other ways of addressing the budget crisis, one for which faculty and staff are not responsible, after all; why are these not being explored? 

The zoom grid, with more people than usual with their cameras on, felt like holding cells, but we could see each other. Someone had to leave and said "in case I'm not here next year, I love you all." This was someone offered early retirement. Others have other "choices," or none. A recently-hired part-time faculty member put it bluntly: "we need to be clear that a lot of us aren't going to be here next year." Sadness rose to anger and resolve. We're not letting this go down without a fight.

I was struck by how the administration's attempt to show care (they could have just let people go as some other places have, they explained, or fired everyone and let them reapply for their jobs, as others have) had backfired. As the deadlines approach for the "eligible" to opt into "voluntary" departure (Monday!), and then to accept or decline the specific offer made to them (2 weeks after that), and then for the administration to announce such "involuntary" departures as they deem necessary (starting January 2nd), we are a community stricken in ways we don't even know. (I know that I am less at risk than many others at this juncture.) The love flowing over the zoom barriers was palpable, tinged with fear and grief.

The convener of the March "Visibilize-ing Care" festival mentioned that some thought the anguish of university restructuring made this the wrong time for it, but others thought it only more valuable. My part of it, "Care of Trees," is inspired by the ways one of the "Religion of Trees" classes marked the passing of some of the Lang courtyard maples. Even as we mark the restoration of some relationships, we - whoever we are, for a lot of us aren't going to be there - will have to find ways to mourn the ruptures of others, too.

On life-support

We're in the news again. 

Things may or may not get better, but they are definitely getting worse first. The ham-fisted way the administration doled out "voluntary" separation packages (most faculty and staff I care about have received one) has reawakened unresolved misunderstandings and tensions between and within divisions, and is creating new ones, too. As with the Part-Time Faculty strike three years ago, it's revealing anew the inequities built into our school.

The damage goes well beyond the full-time faculty and programs explicitly targeted (and the sole concern of those interviewed in the article above). Today I found myself at the semester's final Religion live! gathering in the Cafe surveying the wreckage with four colleagues, none full-time and all of them adversely affected. One is a part-time faculty member of long standing who gave up their slot in next semester's small Religious Studies curriculum for another. The other was there too, but the course they pitched, "Faith as a story," was canceled for low enrollment. (LREL has had to cancel another class next semester as well, leaving just two.) A third, who teaches in a different program, had also seen their regular spring course cut, the first time in ten years it hasn't filled. And the fourth was an MA student who had been counting on applying to the PhD program in Philosophy, only for the university to pause virtually all PhD admissions for the year. 

I was feeling a little like the messengers in Job, who come describing calamities with the refrain and I alone have escaped to tell you.

DIY hat trick

The big reunion happened today - fifteen of the alums who've been involved in the "DIY Religion" class joined us for a final celebration. Three came in person, another dozen online, which turned out to be just right for the capacity of the room. Students helped think of a fun way of celebrating the rewarding conversations they'd had with alums: pairs of current students alums, names pulled from two woolen hats, sat at the front of the room and chatted for three or four minutes about a prompt, also pulled from a hat (by the student from the pair before). 

We each contributed a prompt at the start of the game (I took down some online alums' prompts from the zoom chat) which solicited all manner of interesting anecdotes and reflections. In the end some virtual alums had to leave so we only got through eleven, but it was plenty. (The three prompts which we didn't get to - at right above - may have been picked from the hat and returned!) It all made for a light-hearted and yet open-hearted sharing, smoothly bridging generations and timezones, with every one's voice heard. 

And then, for those there in person, there were donuts from a place an alum had reminisced about. Real or virtual, all are keen to do it again!

Theory in practice

I'm falling into an amusing new habit. Instead of printing out my course syllabi at the start of semester, I'm printing them at the end. Of course students get the syllabi at the start of course through our LMS (learning management system), which they consult with much greater regularity than any syllabus. And things change over the course of a semester, as students choose topics for presentations, etc. These culminating

syllabi are a record of all we actually did, which is always an impressive lot. Am I naive to think they're more likely to keep them this way? In any case, having a collective retrospective read-through is useful for getting feedback on what worked and what didn't, for next time (assuming there is one)! Here's most of the syllabus for this iteration of "Theorizing Religion," with my notes from reflections from each student.

Child's play

Happen to have seen the Brooklyn Museum's version of Edward Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom" (c. 1834) in their Visible Storage yesterday (we'd gone for the unconvincing "Monet and Venice" blockbuster), just in time for the Old Testament reading for Advent 2. As ever, I'm caught short that it nowhere says "the lion shall lie down with the lamb," but this time I was reeling at all the predatory pairings it does mention. 

The wolf shall live with the lamb;
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed^[b] together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze;
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
⁹ They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9, NRSV)

This year, since we are in a time of predators' revachanchism (cf. esp: Hegseth, Pete), it came to me that none of these pairings is arbitrary. Each must recall a time when a leopard actually killed a kid, a bear mauled a cow, a lion attacked an ox, children were killed by snakes. (It was like the moment you realize that the curious details in monastic and legal codes like the Vinaya and Benedict's Rule are reports of actual episodes.) The sheer volume of cases overwhelms, as does the almost deluvian mixed metaphor of a mountain covered by the sea.

We had a guest preacher in church today, who focused on this reading to complement the gospel account of John the Baptist's call to repent - for the kingdom of God is near. Repentance means turning away, she explained, but you can't change course unless you can imagine an alternative. It seems more urgent than ever to imagine a world without normalized, even celebrated violence. Delightfully, she had learned to feel the nearness of the kingdom through reading Ed Yong's wonderful An Immense World.

Cold Moon

Last supermoon of the year, espied early this morning.

Code red

A little update from The New School, where things are not looking good at all. Yesterday all the full-time faculty in the programs slated for pause, merger, reimagining and various kinds of "discontinuance" received letters offering "voluntary separation" packages, as did all non-unionized staff across the university who have served at least four years. At the same time, all full-time faculty over 62 were offered a "voluntary early retirement" package. That's a lot of people spooked and demoralized by the suggestion they are disposable.

A little to my surprise, I didn't receive one of those letters. Being not in a department turned out to be a plus, at least for now. But almost all my friends did get a letter. The hope of course is that enough people are willing and able to take up the "voluntary" offers that there will be no need to turn to "involuntary separations," but we don't know how many people the administration wants to get off the payroll. Meanwhile rumors are swirling about significant and targeted cuts, especially in the erstwhile Graduate Faculty. Nobody seems to know who's calling the shots - deans claim to have been blindsided - so everyone feels at risk.

Acknowledging that the administration's hand has been forced by a budget crisis, this is surely the worst backdrop for ushering in what leadership was touting as the "next generation of undergraduate and graduate credentials." It's terrible for morale, and for the reputation of the school. And, as we all speculate about what programs The New School will support in the future (and the existential question whether there will be place for each of us), it undermines already strained solidarity across and within divisions. Not good times at all.

Has your back

The baboon is one of the forms (with the ibis) of Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of writing, wisdom, magic and the moon, but this imposing baboon seems just to be a baboon, doing what ancient Egyptian baboons were known to do: praising the rising sun.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice

Elect

In the midst of all the other stuff... I'm going to be one of the three co-chairs of The New School's University Faculty Senate next semester.

Wintry mix

Predictably, the Thanksgiving break was long enough for the courtyard maples to shed all their leaves. The ground will still glow red for a spell, but other color will have to wait until the red buds at the end of leafless branches let loose in the spring... Or so I thought, only to be surprised by cardinal (not in the photo)! 

Stalactite city

Always stunning, Elmhgreen and Dragset's "The Hive" at Moynihan.

New chapter

I want to mark a tense, surreal moment. 

This is the time in the academic year when past and future are all bunched up with the present. We plan courses for the academic year beginning next fall, our allocated numbers based in part on experience of last year. Meanwhile registration for the courses beginning in January has taken place, and some courses with low enrollments have to be cut. If a cancelled course was to be taught by a full-time or annualized part-time faculty member, they might be assigned to a course originally planned for someone more junior, though this rarely happens. 

This year everything is different. The budget crunch caused by enrollment shortfalls means the threshold for course cancellation is higher (and a final cull of courses not at 75% has yet to take place), and course allocations for academic year 26-27 have been trimmed, too. But that’s only the tip of the restructuring iceberg. Planning for 26-27 is reeling from the pausing and merging of "duplicative" or low-enrollment programs. Last week we learned that the small undergraduate majors in history, anthropology and sociology have been shut down, their faculty enjoined to work out something more streamlined and attractive to students. Their work, we are told, will serve as a "model" for the rest of the "humanities and social sciences unit." Whatever 26-27 portends, 27-28 will be different again.

And that's not the last of it either. In the coming days, notification of liquidity cliff-forced "reduction in forces" for full-time faculty will begin, with letters offering "voluntary early retirement" and "voluntary separation." We don't know to how many people these will be sent; nor do we know how many of those offers would have to be taken up to forestall the "involuntary separations" which would otherwise ensue - or what determines who will be affected by each of these measures. Against the backdrop of the unmooring of many departments in the "humanities and social sciences unit," this left many of us heading into the Thanksgiving break not knowing if we were soon to be let go.

I'm not dwelling here on my own case, though I would be surprised not to be getting one or other of the kinds of letters promised for this week. I was already senior enough to be "eligible" for "special voluntary separation" when the university was in the throes of COVID five years ago, and my appointment has never been in a department. I expect wrenching choices in the coming week: leave or stay on a possibly sinking ship which might cast me overboard for ballast anyway? I'm far from the only person contemplating these grim questions, though those of us also responsible for curricular planning are experiencing this uncertainty at two levels. Who will teach in 26-27, and who will be designing the curriculum, if there even is one?

The particularly surreal thing is that I'm drafting the syllabus for what is to be Lang version of the core course for the soon-to-be approved major in Individualized Studies (formed from the coming together of the university's two self-design Liberal Arts majors). A pilot was supposed to run next semester but - ha! - is likely to be cut for low enrollment. 

But it's the content of the syllabus that's making me rub my eyes, as I imagine acquainting students with the history and philosophy of education, broadly understood, and more narrowly construed "liberal arts" in its various forms - all in the context of the charmingly quixotic school in which they're designing their individualized course of study. I'm more sympathetic than many of my colleagues to the direction the university is heading (explicitly and intensively bridging liberal arts, design and performance), and can narrate it inspiringly as a new chapter in The New School's storied history... but will I be the one telling the story?

More anon! 

Last Metro

It's the end of an era: 

My last MetroCard expired today! 

New York City is moving to a new system called OMNY, which works directly from people's credit cards, smartphones and even watches - though there will still be a card version. There will still be weekly cards, but the monthlies I've been using to gallivant about the city all these years seem fated to be a thing of the past.

Nation of refuge

I can't let the prez's profanation of Thanksgiving, indeed of the whole American idea, go unremarked on. Abandoning refugees on the day we remember the Pilgrim refugees? I don't know why two National Guardsmen were shot, but, beyond deep sorrow for these people whose oaths to serve in the nation's protection were being exploited, it almost doesn't matter. The manically xenophobic response has been so disproportionate and so comprehensive that it's clearly premeditated. The white nationalists in charge have been itching to gut even legal forms of immigration, and have been waiting for a chance to unleash their venom. This dreary predictability makes it no less of an outrage.

Chlorofilibuster

Gold rush

It happens every year, but late fall ginkgos can be quite dramatic. (I remember streets of gold from when I lived closer to street level!)

Bootleg

The "Practicing Curation" class has offered "A Bootleg Exhibition of the Orozco Room" in a naturally lit basement room. They hung textile reproductions of the original murals - inaccessible during a long process of restoration - around a seating area to try to recreate the way the murals were part of social life at The New School in its first decades, at least until the yellow curtain era, described in an explanatory pamphlet. 

It's quite successful in its bootleg way. The reproduced murals are even more immersive than the originals, which sit a little higher on the walls and are ventilated by windows on either side of the "Table of Universal Brotherhood." I wonder if it was also intentionally that the murals to left and right were inverted. I know two students in the class, will ask! 

Change of season

Revolving doors

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's great for crazy juxtapositions. Here I juxtapose two already juxtaposed things from recently opened exhibitions on subjects worlds and millennia apart, Divine Egypt and Man Ray: When Objects Dream. Above is an apparently unfinished but much-touched 3000-year-old statue (on loan from the Louvre) of four aspects of the goddess Hathor - a crowned cow surrounded by serpent-, lion- and human-headed manifestations. Entirely unrelated but somehow resonant in my image-saturated mind, Man Ray's 1916 collage-like painting "Legend," source of one of the brightly colored prints in his almost animated 1919 "Revolving Doors" (the exhibit's recreation of which someone kindly filmed). Have these less than nothing to do with each other? Precisely. For good or ill, a museum like the Met functions like a collage, a revolving door, maybe a many-faced goddess.

Redesigning curricular systems and well-being

The liberal arts world is in a tizzy over a proposed reorganization of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State, which would rehome (or perhaps dissolve) nineteen departments in four new schools. Besides the two provisionally-named schools in the rather dark graphic from the Chronicle of Higher Education above (final names to be decided by the faculty involved), there would be

{Human Narratives and Creative Expressions}

English; Classics & General Humanities; Philosophy; World Languages & Cultures; Spanish & Latino Studies

 

{Interdisciplinary Programs and Writing Studies}

BA in Interdisciplinary Studies; Medical Humanities; Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies; Writing Studies; Language; Business & Culture

The reorganization has been rejected by the Montclair State faculty, their Senate demanding that disciplinary chairs at least be retained. But the plan (led by a professor of Religious Studies, for what it's worth!) has been offered as a way of trying to save these areas of the curriculum which, at Montclair as nationwide, have seen steep declines in majors. Not only students but younger faculty, too, are already more interdisciplinary in orientation, the proposers argue, and might flourish in these new constellations, freed from the drag of departmental structures. But would this be new curricular freedom or just a new kind of constraint, now by administrators freed from faculty oversight?

The question isn't just academic. Similar things are happening elsewhere, including just 20 miles to the west, chez nous at The New School. 

The university restructuring plan, details of which were officially announced in various larger and smaller meetings this week, will see the shuttering, at least as distinct undergraduate majors, of several small social science departments, with the implications of the consolidations of several humanities programs still up in the air. We're told a budget crisis makes already planned changes more urgent than ever, but nobody quite knows what's going on.

Our provost argues that the last nine years have seen an "unnatural stasis" in our "academic portfolio." "Change," he reminds us somewhat oxymoronically, is "in the DNA" of the school! Meanwhile the president argues that a bright new future lies in defining the "distinctive proposition" of a liberal arts college in a university primarily committed to art and design. I'm not averse to such a reorientation (which isn't to say there'd necessarily be a place for me in it) but the faculty as a whole is restive, and anxious for our future. Is the plan really to save the social science and humanities programs or to do them in?

Aflame

Religious revival meeting!

This was the week for the first years in "DIY Religion" to present what they learned from interviewing fifteen of our alums. We have more work to do, drawing some more general conclusions from what were apparently warm and thoughtful conversations; that's work for next week. For this week we basked in the idiosyncratic accomplishments and inspiring ideas of our fabulous alums! 

We got the world religions in there too, somehow - and then some! Our fifteen included folks who've found their DIY way to being a devotée of Guanyin, an Islamic feminist, the director of an avant garde theater company inspired by Jewish textual exegesis, an intimate of Ram Dass, three Christian priests (MCC, Episcopal and... it's complicated), a Radical Faerie, a rap-recording reviver of traditional Taíno language and spirituality and a young Zoroastrian. Wow...!

Fly me to the moon

"It's so cool how faculty advertise their courses here," one of my first years enthused. 

Having done my fair share of flyering in recent weeks, I didn't have the heart to tell her that this is exceptional, a response to the provost's threat to cancel classes which don't get at least 75% enrollment.

Plutocracy blues

Mood these days? Check out this image from this month's cover article in the progressive Christian magazine Sojourners, "The Big Steal: How Billionnaires are Upending our Lives and our Economy."

Passing storm

Between seasons

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!

Not the least of our challenges - working out who can be elected to represent whom in the new restructured dispensation. Apparently our move to the "two college model" proposed by the president "as thought-starter only" at the start of the summer is as good as decided.

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!